Matt drew my attention to an old paper I’d not seen before: Riggs (1903) on the vertebral column of Brontosaurus . The page I linked there shows only the first page (which in fact is half a page, since Riggs’ work is only in the right column). Why only the first page? As Matt put it, “It’s been 110 years, just give us the PDF already.

We know that most academic journals and edited volumes ask authors to sign a copyright transfer agreement before proceeding with publication. When this is done, the publisher becomes the owner of the paper; the author may retain some rights according to the grace or otherwise of the publisher. Plenty of authors have rightly railed against this land-grab, which publishers have been quite unable to justify.