My thanks for Richard Van Noorden for drawing my attention to his new piece Open access: The true cost of science publishing in Nature . I wrote a detailed comment on this article, but when I went to post it, I was told “This account has been banned from commenting due to posting of comments classified as inappropriate or other violations of our Terms of Service”: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8169 loading=“lazy”

There’s a good, balanced piece by Stephen Pincock in the new Nature , on the question of whether early-career researchers should publish their work in open-access journals.

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Here’s an update from the road–get ready for some crappy raw images, because that’s all I have the time or energy to post (with one exception). {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8148 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8148” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/03/24/omnh-1331-is-my-new-hero/omnh-1331/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/omnh-1331.jpg” orig-size=“2272,1704” comments-opened=“1”

As I noted in a comment on the previous post, titanosaurs have stupid cervicals. As evidence, here is as gallery of titanosaur cervicals featured previously on SV-POW!. 1. From Whassup with your segmented lamina, Uberabatitan ribeiroi ?, an anterior cervical of that very animal, from Salgado and Carvalho (2008: fig. 5). As well as the titular segmented lamina, note the ridiculous ventral positioning of the cervical rib.

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The problem I find myself reading a lot recently about “portable peer-review” — posts like Take me as I am, and my paper as it is? by scicurious at Neurotic Physiology , which excellently diagnoses a terrible, wasteful problem in scientific publishing : What a waste! What a drag on the progress of science! What a ridiculous situation we’re got ourselves into, with our chasing-after-prestigious-journals games.

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We’ve seen a lot of arguments recently about the RCUK open-access policy and the length of embargoes that it allows on Green OA articles under various circumstances. When is it reasonable to insist on six months? When might publishers have cause to want to stretch it out to 24 months? And so on. The truth here is terribly simple.