Back in February last year, I had the privilege of giving one of the talks in the University of Manchester’s PGCert course “Open Knowledge in Higher Education”. I took the subject “Should science always be open?” My plan was to give an extended version of a talk I’d given previously at ESOF 2014.

Long time readers may remember the stupid contortions I had to go through in order to avoid giving the Geological Society copyright in my 2010 paper about the history of sauropod research, and how the Geol. Soc. nevertheless included a fraudulent claim of copyright ownership in the published version. The way I left it back in 2010, my wife, Fiona, was the copyright holder.

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.

In response to my post Copyright from the lens of reality and other rebuttals of his original post, Elseviers General Counsel Mark Seeley has provided a lengthy comment. Here’s my response (also posted as a comment on the original article, but I’m waiting for it to be moderated.)   Hi, Mark, thanks for engaging. You write: Here, at least, we are in complete agreement.

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.