How things have always been Traditional scientific journals ask peer-reviewers to do two things: assess whether a manuscript is scientifically sound, and judge whether it’s sufficiently important to appear in the particular journal it’s been submitted to. So I could have sent my 2009 paper on Brachiosaurus to Nature , and the reviewers would (presumably) have said “this is good science, but not exciting or sexy enough for

Question. I am supposed to be meeting up with Mike Taylor at the conference, but we’ve not met before and I won’t recognise him.  Do you know what he looks like? Candidate Answer #1. He’s a bit overweight and has white hair. Candidate Answer #2. He exhibits mild to moderate abdominal hypertrophy and accelerated ontogenetic degradation in the pigmentation of the cranial integument.

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The speed that things are happening at the moment is astonishing. Whenever we talk about the economics of open access — when I argue that it costs the community eight times as much to publish a paywalled article with Elsevier as it does to publish it as open access with PLoS ONE — I always hear the same argument in response.  And it’s a good argument.

Yesterday, David Willetts, the UK government’s Minister for Universities and Science, gave a speech at the annual general meeting of the Publisher’s Association.  The full text of the speech is online and very well worth reading, though it’s long.

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These are worrying days for barrier-based publishers.  In the few days since I posted part 2 of this series, we have yet another major development in the Open Access world: UK Science Minister David Willetts’ announcement that “we will make publicly funded research accessible free of charge to readers”.

Probably everyone who reads SV-POW! already knows that the manus, or forefoot, or sauropods was very distinctive.  The metacarpal bones, rather than being splayed out horizontally as in the forefeet of most animals, were arranged more or less vertically in a horseshoe shape, hence the characteristic shape of sauropod manus prints.

In the recent post on OMNH 1670, a dorsal vertebra of a giant Apatosaurus from the Oklahoma panhandle, I half-promised to post the only published figure of this vertebra, from Stovall (1938: fig.

Matt and I have been looking in more detail at indications of maturity in sauropod skeletons, as we prepare the submission of the paper arising from our response to Woodruff and Fowler (2012) [part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6].  Here is an oddity.

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