I’m a bit shocked to find it’s now more than five years since Robert Harington’s Scholarly Kitchen post Open Access: Fundamentals to Fundamentalists. I wrote a response in the comments, meaning to also post it here, but got distracted, and then half a decade passed. Here it is, finally. The indented parts are quotes from Harington. It’s always a powerful rhetorical move to call your opponent a fundamentalist. It’s also a lazy one.

I was contacted recently by David Goldenberg (dgoldenberg@gmail.com), a journalist who’s putting together a piece on the biggest dinosaurs. He asked me a few questions, and since I’d taken the time to write answers I thought I may as well post them here.

This post is a response to Copyright from the lens of a lawyer (and poet) , posted a couple of days ago by Elsevier’s General Counsel, Mark Seeley. Yes, I am a slave to SIWOTI syndrome. No, I shouldn’t be wasting my time responding to this. Yes, I ought to be working on that exciting new manuscript that we SV-POW!er Rangers have up and running.

Despite the flagrant trolling of its title, Nature ‘s recent opinion-piece Open access is tiring out peer reviewers is mostly pretty good. But the implication that the rise of open-access journals has increased the aggregate burden of peer-review is flatly wrong, so I felt obliged to leave a comment explaining why. Here is that comment, promoted to a post of its own (with minor edits for clarity):

[Neuroscientist and open-science advocate Erin C. McKiernan invited readers of her blog to vote on which of four candidate projects she should work on next. Today she posted the results, and I couldn’t help but comment. This is what I said, lightly edited.] You should work on what you want to. Time spent on any project other than the one that’s burning in your hindbrain will feel painful, awkward and boring, and probably be unproductive.

No time for anything new, so here’s a post built from parts of other, older posts. The fourth sacral centrum of Haplocanthosaurus CM 879, in left and right lateral view. This is part of the original color version of Wedel (2009: figure 8), from this page. (Yes, I know I need to get around to posting the full-color versions of those figures. It’s on my To Do list.) Note the big invasive fossa on the right side of the centrum.