Having benefitted so hugely from 3D models that Heinrich Mallison made for me — most notably, the Xenoposeidon model that is the supplementary data file for the recent preprint — I realised the time has come for me to learn to do this for myself. To that end, I am going to read all the tutorials he’s written on the subject.

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A few months ago I got an email from Nathan Myers, who asked me: In many ways, I’m the wrong person to ask: I’ve never started a journal, OA or otherwise, nor even served on an editorial board. But, hey, I’m not one to let something like that stop me. So here’s what I told Nathan. I’m sure I missed a lot of important possibilities: please point them out in this comments. I’ll try to keep this post updated as the landscape changes.

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Last October, Mike posted a tutorial on how to choose a paper title, then followed it up by evaluating the titles of his own papers. He invited me to do the same for my papers. I waited a few days to allow myself to forget Mike’s comments on our joint papers – not too hard during my fall anatomy teaching – and then wrote down my thoughts. And then did nothing with them for three and a half months.

In light of yesterday’s tutorial on choosing titles, here are the titles of all my own published papers (including co-authored ones), in chronological order, with my own sense of whether I’m happy with them now I look back. All the full references are on my publications page (along with the PDFs). I’ll mark the good ones in green, the bad ones in red and the merely OK in blue.

Over on his (excellent) Better Posters blog, Zen Faulks has been critiquing a poster on affective feedback. The full title of the poster is “Studying the effects of affective feedback in embodied tutors”. Among other points, Zen makes this one: I think that’s right on target. Unfortunately, we in palaeo are mired in an ancient tradition of uninformative paper titles.

I got in a conversation recently with a friend who is about to have his first paper published. It’s been through review and is now accepted at a well-respected old-school journal owned by a legacy publisher. It’s not an open-access journal, and he asked my advice on how he could make the paper open access. We had a fruitful discussion, and we agreed that I’d write up the conclusions for this blog.

In his post on Vicki’s new book Broken Bones , Matt told us his twelve-step process for producing stippled illustrations like this one of a crushed skull, which became the cover image of the book: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-9460 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“9460” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/12/18/vickis-book-broken-bones-is-out/skull-drawing-f1-original-on-white/”