I said last time that Jisc’s feeble transition-to-open-access report was the first of two disapointing scholarly-communication announcements that week. The second was of course the announcement that PeerJ has been acquired by Taylor and Francis. Matt and I have both been big fans of PeerJ since before it launched, and we were delighted to have our 2013 neck-anatomy paper in the first batch of articles published there.

My talk (Taylor et al. 2023) from this year’s SVPCA is up! The talks were not recorded live. But while it was fresh in my mind, I did a screencast of my own, and posted it on YouTube (CC By). For the conference, I spoke very quickly and omitted some details to squeeze it into a 15-minute slot. In this version, I go a bit slower and make some effort to ensure it’s intelligible to an intelligent layman. That’s why it runs 21 minutes.

We’ve noted many times over the years how inconsistent pneumatic features are in sauropod vertebra. Fossae and formamina vary between individuals of the same species, and along the spinal column, and even between the sides of individual vertebrae.

No, not his new Brachiosaurus humerus — his photograph of the Chicago Brachiosaurus mount, which he cut out and cleaned up seven years ago: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-8757 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8757” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/08/30/heres-that-brachiosaurus-altithorax-skeleton-you-ordered/fmnh-brachiosaurus-mount-lateral/”

Matt and I are about to submit a paper. One of the journals we considered — and would have really liked in many respects — turned out to use the CC By-NC-SA license. This is a a very well-intentioned licence that allows free use except for commercial purposes, and which imposes the same licence on all derivative works. While that sounds good, there are solid reasons to prefer the simpler CC By licence.

My talk (Taylor and Wedel 2019) from this year’s SVPCA is up! The talks were not recorded live (at least, if they were, it’s a closely guarded secret). But while it was fresh in my mind, I did a screencast of my own, and posted it on YouTube (CC By). I had to learn how to do this for my 1PVC presentation on vertebral orientation, and it’s surprisingly straightforward on a Mac, so I’ve struck while the iron is hot.

Open-access journalist Richard Poynder posted a really good interview today with the Gates Foundation’s Associate Officer of Knowledge & Research Services, Ashley Farley.

Step 1: Include the Share-Alike provision in your Creative Commons license, as in the mysteriously popular CC BY-SA and CC BY-NC-SA. Step 2: Listen to the crickets. You’re done. Congratulations! No-one will ever use your silhouette in a scientific paper, and they probably won’t use your stuff in talks or posters either. Luxuriate in your obscurity and wasted effort.

For a long while, there has been a lot of anger among researchers and academic librarians towards the legacy publishers: the big corporations that control access to most of the world’s scholarly output. But what exactly is the problem? Let’s briefly consider several possibilities, and see if we can figure out which ones really matter.

In my recent preprint on the incompleteness and distortion of sauropod neck specimens, I discuss three well-known sauropod specimens in detail, and show that they are not as well known as we think they are. One of them is the Giraffatitan brancai lectotype MB.R.2181 (more widely known by its older designation HMN SII), the specimen that provides the bulk of the mighty mounted skeleton in Berlin.