I was very pleased, on checking my email this morning, to see that my and Matt’s new paper, The neck of Barosaurus was not only longer but also wider than those of Diplodocus and other diplodocines, is now up as a PeerJ preprint!

I was astonished yesterday to read Understanding and addressing research misconduct, written by Linda Lavelle, Elsevier’s General Counsel, and apparently a specialist in publication ethics: So here (right in the first paragraph of Lavelle’s article) we see copyright infringement equated with plagiarism.

Let’s take another look at that Giraffatitan cervical.

Mark Witton, pterosaur-wrangler, Cthulhu-conjurer, globe-trotting paleo playboy and all-around scientific badass, drew this (and blogged about it): {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8899 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8899” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/09/17/phat-air-meets-wide-gauge-meets-color/buzzed-small/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/buzzed-small.jpg” orig-size=“693,981” comments-opened=“1”

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8887 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8887” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/09/16/brian-engh-stomp-time/futalognkosaurusstompingweb/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/futalognkosaurusstompingweb.jpg” orig-size=“905,1153” comments-opened=“1”

I thought I’d done a decent job of illustrating MB.R.2180:C5 last time, but Wedel was not satisfied, demanding ventral and right-lateral views as well as the provided right lateral, anterior, posterior and dorsal.

Janensch’s (1950) paper on the vertebral column of Giraffatitan (which he called Brachiosaurus brancai , wrongly as it turns out) is in many ways a superb piece of work.

Suppose you’re working on a Wealden sauropod — for example, the disturbingly Camarasaurus -like isolated dorsal vertebra NHM R2523 — and for some reason you desperately want to publish your work in Cretaceous Research . {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8841 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8841” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/09/14/who-owns-journals/bmnh-r2523-orthogonal/”

[Background: read Stephen Curry’s excellent summary of the new BIS select committee report on Open Access.] Paul Jump’s coverage of open-access issues in Times Higher Education continues with today’s post discussing the fallout from the new BIS report. That report says: There’s your problem, right there.

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8833 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8833” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/09/11/beards-of-the-mesozoic-bob-nicholls-edition/apatosaurus1b/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/apatosaurus1b.jpg” orig-size=“2942,2362” comments-opened=“1”

I just read Mick Watson’s post Why I resigned as PLOS ONE academic editor on his blog [opiniomics](http://biomickwatson.wordpress.com/ “bioinformatics, genomes, biology etc.