In discussions of open access, it’s pretty common for us biologists to suffer from arXiv envy: the sense that mathematicians and physicists have the access problem solved, because they all put their work on arXiv. That’s a widespread idea, which is why we see tweets like this one, which floated past in my stream today: Turns out, not so much.

A confidential internal email has come into my hands, from Bristol University, regarding the UK’s national negotiations with Elsevier. I think it’s of general interest. (I should say that, although my own affiliation is also with Bristol, this is a complete coincidence: for avoidance of doubt, the person I received this from is not at Bristol.)

Good news! Probably by now everyone’s heard about the European Union’s conclusions on the transition towards an Open Science system. This is progressive and positive, pretty much from start to finish. It’s so good that you should really read the whole thing — but here are some edited highlights: Well, the good news just keeps coming.

I’m on a public mailing list that was initially set up for delegates of the OSI2016 conference. In a recent email to that list, I pointed out that we can never know whether or not publishers are double-dipping (accepting APCs and subscriptions for the same content) unless they are totally transparent about their finances — and nothing in their history makes it likely that that’s ever going to happen.

I mentioned on Twitter that I’d left a comment on the Scholarly Kitchen that had been blocked in moderation, and several people asked what the comment was.

Here is a vertebra that Matt and I saw on our recent travels through Utah: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-13531 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“13531” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2016/05/25/an-sv-pow-challenge-what-is-this-vertebra/img_2530/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/img_2530.jpg” orig-size=“4000,3000” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"3.5","credit":"","camera":"Canon PowerShot

It’s very doubtful that Franz J. Ingelfinger ever intended the rule named in his honour to prevent online preprints — after all, such things didn’t exist when he introduced his no-prior-publication policy at the New England Journal of Medicine in 1969, or even at the time of his death in 1980. Yet the rule lingers on in corrupt form.

In a recent blog-post, Kevin Smith tells it like it is: legacy publishers are tightening their grip in an attempt to control scholarly communications. “The same five or six major publishers who dominate the market for scholarly journals are engaged in a race to capture the terms of and platforms for scholarly sharing”, says Smith.

Another day, another puff-piece from academic publishers about how awesome they are. This time, the Publisher’s Association somehow suckered the Guardian into giving them a credible-looking platform for their party political broadcast, Think academic publishers are greedy? Do your research . I have to give the PA credit for coming up with about the most patronising title possible. Yes, I did my research. Guess what?

As regular readers will know, Matt and I have recently spent ten glorious days travelling the dinosaur museums of Utah, in a once-in-a-lifetime event that we have been calling the Sauropocalypse. In that time, we visited seven different museums and — this is the truth — had an absolutely fantastic time in all of them. One of the big reasons is of course the quality of their collections and galleries.