Question. I am supposed to be meeting up with Mike Taylor at the conference, but we’ve not met before and I won’t recognise him.  Do you know what he looks like? Candidate Answer #1. He’s a bit overweight and has white hair. Candidate Answer #2. He exhibits mild to moderate abdominal hypertrophy and accelerated ontogenetic degradation in the pigmentation of the cranial integument.

Folks, you should all stop reading this blog right now, and get yourselves across to What’s In John’s Freezer? , the awesome new blog of biomechanics wizard and brachiosaur-cervical scan facilitator John Hutchinson.

In among all the open-access discussion and ostrich-herding, we at SV-POW! Towers do still try to get some actual science done.  As we all know all too well, the unit of scientific communication is the published paper , and getting a submission ready involves a lot more than just the research itself.

Folks, just a short post to let you know that, together with my colleagues in the @access Working Group, I have just launched a new web-site. One of the problems we have in promoting Open Access is getting non-scholars involved.  So the whole enterprise can feel like an ivory-tower issue, one that just doesn’t affect the great majority of people.  But that’s not true. The new site is called Who needs access?

An interesting conversation arose in the comments to Matt’s last post — interesting to me, at least, but then since I wrote much of it, I am biased.  I think it merits promotion to its own post, though.  Paul Graham, among many others, has written about how one of the most important reasons to write about a subject is that the process of doing so helps you work through exactly what you think about it.

Here’s an excerpt from a Google chat conversation that Mike and I had last May. I’m posting it now as a break from the OA Wars, and because it’s annoying to have to keep track of stuff that we know about but haven’t talked about publicly. Matt: Something occurred to me the other day, and I can’t remember whether I’ve discussed it with you or not. So sorry in advance if it’s a dupe. Mike: np.

Most of you will know that the major US science-funding agencies require the work they fund (from the public purse) to be made available as open-access to the public that funded it.  And it’s hard for me to imagine anyone sees that requirement as anything other than straightforwardly just.

And so we come, rather belatedly, to the fourth and final part of this series on preparing and giving talks at scientific conferences.  If you’ve followed the previous installments, you should have figured out a clear, compelling story that you want to tell from your research; you should have clear slides with striking, relevant images and no visual distractions;

The best part of a month ago, we posted the first two articles in a series of four on giving good talks: part 1 on planning, and part 2 on preparing the actual slides.  Then we got distracted and posted a whole sequence of articles on Open Access ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]).

A month ago today, George Monbiot’s piece Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist was published in The Guardian.  It stirred up a lot of debate, and has garnered 365 comments so far, most of them strongly supportive.