Last time, we looked at what the term “open access” actually means. We noted that its been widely abused, so that when you need to be specific about the full meaning you need to say “BOAI-compliant”; we recognised that much of what is described as OA is really only “gratis OA”, or as Ross Mounce called it, “gratis access”; and we noted that the term “libre open access” is literally meaningless and should be avoided.

I’m going to keep this free of advocacy. Hopefully everything I say here will be uncontroversial, because all I am doing is surveying definitions and clarifying distinctions. I’ll save my opinions for later articles (not that there is any secret about them). Open access (or OA) It may seem a bit surprising to have to define “open access” when we’ve all been talking about about constantly for a year.

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!

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.

And so we come, rather belatedly, to the fourth and final part of this series on preparing and giving talks at scientific conferences.  If you’ve followed the previous installments, you should have figured out a clear, compelling story that you want to tell from your research; you should have clear slides with striking, relevant images and no visual distractions;

If you’re a scientist, then one of the things you need to do is prepare high-quality images for your papers.  And, especially if you’re a palaeontologist, or in some other science that involves specimens, that’s often going to mean manipulating photographs.

The best part of a month ago, we posted the first two articles in a series of four on giving good talks: part 1 on planning, and part 2 on preparing the actual slides.  Then we got distracted and posted a whole sequence of articles on Open Access ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]).

Matt, Darren and I were all in Lyme Regis last week for SVPCA 2011, the Symposium of Vertebrate Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy — an excellent technical conference similar in some ways to SVP, but much nicer because it’s small enough that you can see all the talks and meet all the people. This is the seafront, from the Cobb (harbour wall) at the west end of the beach, looking east.

Last time, we looked at the bones of the sauropod skeleton, and I mentioned that “thanks to the wonder of homology, it doubles as a primer for dinosaur skeletons in general”.  To prove it, here everyone’s favourite vulgar, overstudied theropod Tyrannosaurus rex , in L. M. Sterling’s reconstruction from Osborn 1906:plate XXIV, published just one year after the big guy’s initial description.

We should have done this long ago.  Back in the early tutorials, we covered skeletal details such as regions of the vertebral column, basic vertebral anatomy, pneumaticity and laminae, but we never started out with an overview of the sauropod skeleton. Time to fix that.  This is numbered as Tutorial 15 but you can think of it as Tutorial Zero if you prefer.