Three years ago, Tom Redd made a very generous commitment to the SV-POW! Patreon, and he remains our most generous donor in total. When I wrote to thank him his reply included “I have thousands of questions about apatosaurus that I would like to ask you some day.” It seemed only fair to invite him to ask some of those questions, so we asked him to give us five and said we’d try to answer them.

I just gave an answer to this question on Quora, and it occurred to me that I ought to also give it a permanent home here.

Last night, I did a Twitter interview with Open Access Nigeria (@OpenAccessNG). To make it easy to follow in real time, I created a list whose only members were me and OA Nigeria. But because Twitter lists posts in reverse order, and because each individual tweet is encumbered with so much chrome, it’s rather an awkward way to read a sustained argument. So here is a transcript of those tweets, only lightly edited. They are in bold;

We’re starting the new year with a new feature, in which we answer questions that have come our way. We never had a policy about not answering questions, it’s just that previous ones have tended to arrive in the comments section and have been dealt with there. But suddenly in the last few days I’ve gotten two questions from extrabloggular sources, and rather than hide the replies I thought I’d make them available to all.