In what is by now a much-reported story, @DNLee, who writes the Urban Scientist blog on the Scientific American blog network, was invited by Biology Online to write a guest-post for their blog.

Suppose, hypothetically, that you worked for an organisation whose nominal goal is the advancement of science, but which has mutated into a highly profitable subscription-based publisher. And suppose you wanted to construct a study that showed the alternative — open-access publishing — is inferior.

An extraordinary study has come to light today, showing just how shoddy peer-review standards are at some journals. Evidently fascinated by Science ‘s eagerness to publish the fatally flawed Arsenic Life paper, John Bohannon conceived the idea of constructing a study so incredibly flawed that it didn’t even include a control.

Remember at the start of the year, Matt and I had a contest to design a cover for a random book in half an hour? I came up with this: Well, today I saw that my wife is reading Abraham Vergese’s novel Cutting for Stone (which, for what it’s worth, she says is very good). Here’s the cover: You can’t tell me that ‘s a coincidence.

Anyone else see these images and really, REALLY want to go dissect one of these bad boys? From the moment I saw this in the trailer, I was thinking: “WANT!” Click to embiggen, and check out the heavy equipment being used to cart off the soft tissue.

We jumped the gun a bit in asking How fat was Camarasaurus ? a couple of years ago, or indeed How fat was Brontosaurus ? last year. As always, we should have started with extant taxa, to get a sense of how to relate bones to live animals — as we did with neck posture.

It was Enrique Jardiel Poncela who said that “When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing”. I would have guessed at someone like Mark Twain, or maybe G. K. Chesterton, but there you go. A couple of months ago, I sent an eight-page submission to the House of Commons BIS Committee’s inquiry into the Goverment’s Open Access policy.

Just like the last time I tried to post a comment on Richard Van Noorden’s piece on open-access economics, the comment I posted has been rejected with a fatuous “This account has been banned from commenting due to posting of comments classified as inappropriate or other violations of our Terms of Service” message. SERIOUSLY, NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP.

My thanks for Richard Van Noorden for drawing my attention to his new piece Open access: The true cost of science publishing in Nature . I wrote a detailed comment on this article, but when I went to post it, I was told “This account has been banned from commenting due to posting of comments classified as inappropriate or other violations of our Terms of Service”: This news to me. No-one at Nature thought to tell

If you found the hypothetical Amphicoelias fragillimus cervical in a recent post a bit too much to swallow, I won’t blame you. But how big do we know Morrison diplodocoid cervicals got? The longest centrum of any specimen of anything, anywhere, is that of the cervical vertebra BYU 9024 that’s part of the Supersaurus vivianae holotype.