Here’s an excerpt from a Google chat conversation that Mike and I had last May. I’m posting it now as a break from the OA Wars, and because it’s annoying to have to keep track of stuff that we know about but haven’t talked about publicly. Matt: Something occurred to me the other day, and I can’t remember whether I’ve discussed it with you or not. So sorry in advance if it’s a dupe. Mike: np.

Most of you will know that the major US science-funding agencies require the work they fund (from the public purse) to be made available as open-access to the public that funded it.  And it’s hard for me to imagine anyone sees that requirement as anything other than straightforwardly just.

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;

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]).

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.

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.

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 is a guest post by frequent commenter Heinrich Mallison .  Heinrich is maybe best known to SV-POW! readers for his work on digital modelling of sauropodomorphs, though that may change now that his paper on sauropod rearing mechanics is out.  Read on …] Maybe this post should have been titled “How sauropods breathed, ate, and farted”. Or maybe not.

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”.

Amongst the other things that I do I am a fairly serious amateur musician. I sing regularly and irregularly in choirs, have occassionally done some solo vocal work, conduct a bit, and in the past written fairly substantial pieces of music for orchestra and choir. When I started university I made a choice between doing music or doing science.