I just sent this email to Darin Croft (of SVP). I chose to contact him because he recently answered questions about the embargo for EmbargoWatch and it was rather unclear who else I should approach. I did not want to blanket email the whole council.

Sometimes you just have to laugh… The year is 2012, we have the internet, we have blogs, and a huge variety of other tools to enable free, efficient and rapid communication of information and yet the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting rules still insist that all information within this year’s abstract booklet remain a big secret until the day of the event. Many others have justly written to complain about this before.

[I’m cross posting this from the OKFN version so I can embed the audio of the show in the post] Last Friday (17/08/12), representing the Open Knowledge Foundation, I had the pleasure of discussing the new Research Councils UK (RCUK) plan for all UK publicly-funded research to be published Open Access, on a special half hour Voice of Russia UK broadcast radio discussion.

just a quick post… I’m pretty shocked at the poor indexing service given by Thompson Reuters Web of Knowledge (or ISI Web of Science as you might know it). I’ve unashamedly bashed them before and I’ll bash them again here.

I realise thus far, I may not have explained too clearly exactly what I’m doing for my Panton fellowship. With this post I shall attempt to remedy this and shed a little more light on what I’ve been doing lately.

[A monthly update on my Panton Fellowship related activities] Last month I was slightly late with my monthly report, so this month I’m going to get things back on track and write my post now, on this leisurely sunny Sunday afternoon… It’s been a good month: First of all, I had the chance to speak about my Fellowship work for the Ede & Ravenscroft Prize final.

I have previously commented elsewhere on other blogs, that uniquely, with BOAI-compliant Open Access literature, one is able to re-distribute research however one wishes (provided proper attribution is given). I believe this to be hugely beneficial and perhaps a rather under-appreciated facet of the plurality of benefits offered by Open Access publishing.

This is a parody of a recent blog post over in Elsevier-land by David Tempest.

Research Councils UK (RCUK) – a partnership of seven core UK research funding bodies (AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, and STFC), has recently released a very welcome draft policy document detailing their proposed Open Access mandate , for all research which they help fund.

[Rather than summarise what’s already been said about Elsevier and their for-excessive-profit practices in recent weeks, I’ll just lazily assume you’ve read it all… right then. Here’s what I have to add.] This post is a real-world anecdote of the problems that Elsevier’s journal bundling & excessive profiteering*** causes.