Today’s Guardian has a piece by Graham Taylor, director of academic, educational and professional publishing at the Publishers Association, entitled Attacking publishers will not make open access any more sustainable . It’s such a crock that I felt compelled to respond point-by-point in the comments.

Yesterday, David Willetts, the UK government’s Minister for Universities and Science, gave a speech at the annual general meeting of the Publisher’s Association.  The full text of the speech is online and very well worth reading, though it’s long.

Given the huge amount we’ve written about open access on this blog, it may come as a surprise to realise that the blog itself has not been open access until today.  It’s been free to read, of course, but in the absence of an explicit licence statement, the default “all rights reserved” has applied, which has meant that technically you’re not supposed to do things like, for example, using SV-POW! material in course notes.

This arrived in my inbox last week, but I’ve been too busy to blog about it until now. Not surprisingly, I have comments. First, this is huge news. I am certain that Taylor &

Item 1 : With his new piece at the Guardian,  “Persistent myths about open access scientific publishing”, Mike continues to be a thorn in the side of exploitative commercial publishers, who just can’t seem to keep their facts straight.

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 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!

When my youngest brother was about eight years old, he quipped, “French fries: they may be high in fat, they may be high in cholesterol, but doggone it, they’re salty .” I often think about that in reference to barrier-based academic publishing. It doesn’t serve authors, it doesn’t serve readers, it doesn’t serve academic libraries, but doggone it, at least it costs vastly more than it should.

In among all the open-access discussion and ostrich-herding, we at SV-POW! Towers do still try to get some actual science done.  As we all know all too well, the unit of scientific communication is the published paper , and getting a submission ready involves a lot more than just the research itself.

A quick note to remind everyone that although the RWA is dead, that only brings us back to the status quo.  At present, it’s still the case that the great majority of US government-funded research goes behind paywalls .  Although the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a public access policy that is resulting in a lot of papers being posted for general access at PubMed Central, the NIH is only one of a dozen U.S.