Progress Report

An update on the Elsevier situation: Now Harvard University admits they can't afford journal subscriptions svpow.com/2012/04/23/harvards-… , and urges their professors to move to open-access journals. The Department of Mathematics at the Technical University of Munich just voted to CANCEL all subscriptions to Elsevier journals:

Because of unsustainable subscription prices and conditions, the board of directors of the mathematics department has voted to cancel all of its subscriptions to Elsevier journals by 2013. svpow.com/2012/05/04/they-said…

To quote Dr. Mike Taylor of SV-POW:
Publishers who are paying attention will surely start to realise that they have pushed their exploitative prices too far, and that they don't hold libraries in a steely grip any more.  I wonder how this will play into investment advice regarding Elsevier?

This isn't the kind of problem that can be fixed by hiring a PR person.  I've argued this before, but if Elsevier are going to survive, they'll need to be much clearer in the their communications, eliminate practices that alienate authors, and ultimately change their business model entirely.

This is good news indeed, but it can't come soon enough. Some of the newest sauropod papers just published are (unwisely) STILL being submitted by their authors in paywalled journals of Elsevier's ilk, such as Taylor & Francis, and Wiley. One wonders how many academics are truly paying attention to the long-overdue changing times, after SV-POW (not to mention a thousand other scientific blogs) have been raising this issue for OVER A YEAR now. Sorely regrettable are (at the very least) the following cases:

* The full re-evaluation paper of "Toni" the baby sauropod as a brachiosaur (its brachiosaur identity was already known in paleo-circles since 2010), which was recently published in Wiley: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10…

* The "reappraisal" of Argyrosaurus specimens and the rediscription of one of them as a separate genus in JVP, the flagship journal of the Society of vertebrate Paleontology which was shamefully privatized on a silver platter to Taylor & Francis: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10… While I love the old JVP, the newer post-privatization issues raise a fundamental question: is it in any way economically reasonable, never mind fair, to make a nonprofit society journal the property of a private for-profit corporation in exchange for simply getting a discount for members? Does it make sense to just give away JVP, after everything it once was, to a company 2.bp.blogspot.com/-bSOIa7oHoNY… whose business practices are the very ANTITHESIS of free exchange of scientific knowledge?

Other news:

A new version of my Futalognkosaurus skeletal is completed, with new data from photos that have turned up recently. It turns out the hips were dead wrong in the previous versions, and the sacral spines were a good deal taller than I thought before.

Also I have renovated my Giraffatitan, and a Sauroposeidon skeletal is in the works (lucky you, Paleo King, only four bones! - but they tell a lot about the proportions of the animal, which were far more extreme than those of Giraffatitan). Also the juvenile OMNH specimen discovered by Ostrom decades ago will be illustrated for the first time. I will be working on a number of other projects, including Paralititan.