Tonight, I sent my submission to Research Councils UK in response to their call for comments on the recently issued docment RCUK Proposed Policy on Access to Research Outputs .  I am now posting my comments publicly.

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Just a quick note that I’m the interview subject in the P.S.I.O.N podcast this week.  P.S.I.O.N is the Paediatric Surgery International Online Network — an area far outside my expertise, but of course what we talked about was open access rather than paediatric surgery.

By one of those happy coincidences that you sometimes get, today saw the publication of not one but two dinosaur ontogeny papers: this morning I was sent a copy of Woodruff and Fowler (2012) on ontogenetic changes in the bifid spines of diplodocoids, and tonight I was alerted to Werning (2012) on Tenontosaurus growth trajectories based on osteohistology. It’s interesting to compare them.

A few weeks ago, I noted that the new journal Biology Open , which had just published its very first issue, had made the unfortunate choice to use the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.

My new piece is now up the LSE Impact Blog — in which I recognise that it’s a mistake to think of Elsevier and other for-profit barrier-based publishers as evil.  The money quote: For the rest, read the article: Visibility is currency in academia but it is scarcity in publishing. The push for open access shows that academic publishers can’t serve two masters. By the way, if you read it, do leave a comment;

A short one, because I’ve been commenting on other people’s blogs a lot recently ( Scholarly Kitchen , Open and Shut , The Scientist ) and it infuriates me how hard it is get a good back-and-forth discussion going in those venues. The contrast of course is with SV-POW!

…with sauropod bones! Lots of basements have them. Some basements have had them for decades, and other basements have been newly constructed to house them. So you can take advantage of that retro chic while taking your basement into the 21st century! What the heck am I talking about?

Well, I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog trying to determine what the terms are for Elsevier’s elective open-access articles — what they term “Sponsored Articles”.

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I have discovered a new nugget of information in my ongoing quest (part 1, part 2, part 3) to discover what the licence terms are for author-pays Gold Open Access articles in Elsevier journals. You will recall from way back in part 1 that Elsevier’s own “Sponsored Articles” page doesn’t include that information. A while after I posted that, they added a link to this page.