Two things to briefly report. First, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has just announced its new policy that “all published EPSRC-funded research articles submitted for publication from 1 September 2011 must be made available on an Open Access basis”.  This policy brings EPSRC in line with other UK Research Councils (EPSRC is one of seven), the Wellcome Trust, and US funding bodies such as the NSF and NIH.

You don’t need to read this. You can read Scott Aaronson’s Review of The Access Principle and Tim O’Reilly’s Piracy is Progressive Taxation and connect the blindingly obvious dots. OTOH, Aaronson and O’Reilly wrote their pieces for the same reason I’m writing this one: some things are not blinding obvious to everyone. And sometimes the situation makes me mad enough to take a swing. So here goes.

A month ago today, George Monbiot’s piece Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist was published in The Guardian.  It stirred up a lot of debate, and has garnered 365 comments so far, most of them strongly supportive.

A quick note to let you all know that George Monbiot’s piece Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist has been published in The Guardian, one of the four respected “broadsheet” national daily newspapers of the UK.  (It was online yesterday, and is in today’s print edition.) A few key quotes: I encourage you to read the whole thing. None of this will be news to long-time SV-POW!

This just in, forwarded to the ICZN mailing list by Donat Agosti: In short, this means that if you work on plants, you will be able, starting in January, to name new species in electronic-only publications such as PLoS ONE and Palaeontologia Electronica — publications that are becoming increasingly important due to their openness and easy accessibility. This is great news for botanists.

Since the publication of Brontomerus , which let’s remember was only a couple of weeks ago, Matt’s had the rather bad manners to post about another new paper of his — a review of prosauropod pneumaticity which might be uncharitably summarised as “Were prosauropods pneumatic?  The fossils say yes”.

In most journals, in-line citations are by author and year.  So, for example, if someone writes “ Haplocanthosaurus has been recovered as a non-diplodocimorph diplodocoid (Wilson 2002)”, you know that the paper that recovered Haplo in that position was, well, Wilson 2002.  And everyone who works on sauropods is familiar with Wilson 2002.

Over at his truly unique blog Paleo Errata , Jeff Martz is claiming that Stereopairs Are Cool.

For anyone who doesn’t already know, Palaeontologia Electronica is an on-line, open-access palaeontology journal — the only one in the world (unless you count Acta Pal Pol , which is freely available online and also published on paper.) PE is sponsored by the Palaeontological Association, the Paleontological Society and the Society of Vertebrtate Paleontology, the big three professional associations, so you

Here is an oddity. When the Geological Society sent my the PDF of my sauropod-history paper, their e-mail contained the following rather extraordinary assertions: I think, and I hope you will all agree with me, that the idea of providing a finite number of “electronic reprints” is profoundly misguided and patently unenforcible.  But let’s skip blithely around that and focus on the core issue.