I was astonished yesterday to read Understanding and addressing research misconduct, written by Linda Lavelle, Elsevier’s General Counsel, and apparently a specialist in publication ethics: So here (right in the first paragraph of Lavelle’s article) we see copyright infringement equated with plagiarism.

Gah! No time, no time. I am overdue on some things, so this is a short pointer post, not the thorough breakdown this paper deserves. The short, short version: Schachner et al. (2013) is out in PeerJ, describing airflow in the lungs of Nile crocs, and showing how surprisingly birdlike croc lungs actually are.

It’s an oddity to me that when publishers try to justify their existence with long lists of the valuable services they provide, they usually skip lightly over one of the few really big ones.

I just saw this tweet from palaeohistologist Sarah Werning, and it summed up what science is all about so well that I wanted to give it wider and more permanent coverage: https://twitter.com/sarahwerning/status/277321783571517442 This is exactly right. Kudos to Sarah for saying it so beautifully.

In a third “open letter to the mathematics community”, Elsevier have announced that, for “the primary mathematics journals”, they now offer free access to all articles over four years old. The details page shows that 53 journals are involved.

As you’ll know from all the recent AMNH basement (and YPM gallery) photos, Matt and I spent last week in New York (with a day-trip to New Haven). The week immediately before that, I spent in Boston with Index Data, my day-job employers. Both weeks were fantastic — lots of fun and very productive.

I was searching for some information — what proportion of Elsevier’s revenue is from journal subscriptions.  So far, I’ve been unsuccessful with that (can anyone help?), but along the way I stumbled across Elsevier’s Annual Reports and Financial Statements for 2011. And it makes happy reading.

I’m very aware that I’ve been whining incessantly on this blog recently: RWA this, Elsevier that, moan whine complain.  So I’m delighted to be able to bring some good news.  Mike Keesey’s site PhyloPic.org is back up, in new and improved form, and providing free silhouettes of organisms extincts and extant.

Although I’m on record of being no fan of the tabloids, there’s no doubt that they are hugely influential.  So it has to be good news to find that in the last few hours, both Nature and Science have publicly come out against the Research Works Act.

With our baby’s appearance in National Geographic this week, she’s now been in four mainstream magazines: That’s National Geographic at top left, Macleans next to it; The Scientist at bottom left, and National Geographic Kids next to that.