Here at SV-POW! Towers, we’re keenly aware that some of our fans are just here for the hardcore sauropod vertebra action. These folks start to shift in their seats when we put up too many posts in a row on open access or rabbits or…okay, mostly just OA and bunnies. If that’s you – or, heck, even if it isn’t – your good day has come. Saddle up. Let’s ride.

I spent much of yesterday morning at the launch meeting of HEFCE’s new report on the use of metrics, The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management.

This just in: Wilson and Allain’s (2015) redescription of Rebbachisaurus garasbae , the type and only true species of Rebbachisaurus ! {.size-full .wp-image-12269 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-12269” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“12269” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2015/07/08/rebbachisaurus-gets-a-proper-description/wilsonallain2015-osteology-of-rebbachisaurus-garasbae-fig3/”

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I wanted to get my initial report on the Joni Mitchell conference out quickly. But since posting it, more thoughts have bubbled up through my mind. I’m thinking here mostly about how a humanities conference varies from a science one.

I got back this lunchtime from something a bit different in my academic career. I attended Court and Spark: an International Symposium on Joni Mitchell, hosted by the university of Lincoln and organised by Ruth Charnock.

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You know what’s wrong with scholarly publishing? Wait, scrub that question. We’ll be here all day. Let me jump straight to the chase and tell you the specific problem with scholarly publishing that I’m thinking of. There’s nowhere to go to find all open-access papers, to download their metadata, to access it via an open API, to find out what’s new, to act as a platform for the development of new tools.

I just read this on The Scholarly Kitchen and nearly fell out of my seat: I think this may be the most revealing thing ever written on The Scholarly Kitchen . It’s hard to see a way of reading it that isn’t contemptuous of everyone outside the Magic Circle. Ideally, the great unwashed should be excluded altogether;

A while back, we noted that seriously, Apatosaurus is just nuts, as proven by the illustrations in Ostrom and McIntosh (1966: plate 12). Now I’m posting those illustrations again, in a modified form, to make the same point.

Last week I went to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the twice-yearly meet-up with my Index Data colleagues. On the last day, four of us took a day-trip out to Peggy’s Cove to eat lunch at Ryer Lobsters.