Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called 
Recently, I wrote about dangers to anthropological funding. The posts were largely based on information from the American Anthropological Association, who were justifiably concerned about the situation.
Kambiz, over at Anthropology.Net has a post up regarding their position on open access:
The blurb proclaims, in summary, the AAA's stance on another bill proposal. However, this time, this bill does not seem to hamper scientific research but rather facilitate its growth by making federally funded research to ultimately be open access after a certain time. The summary of the S. 2695 bill reads,
The proposed legislation would require final manuscripts of peer-reviewed journal articles based on federally-funded research to be made freely available on government-hosted websites.
The AAA is against this proposal. See here for their position. Kambiz continues:
The hypocrisy that surrounds the AAA when it begged for anthropologists to protest to the US government to not cut funding but their recent resiliency to not give back is outstanding in this matter. I don't get why the AAA won't open their eyes and see that this form of publishing helps to ensure long-term access to scholarly articles. Unlike articles that are licensed in traditional article databases, like their closed AnthroSource, public libraries and institutions of the people (like universities) can create local copies and repositories of these resources. People, by working together to make repositories of open access literature, can ensure continued access to these scholarly publications into the distant future.
I couldn't agree more. If I am going to help the AAA get funding for research the least they can do is let me go on line and read the results of that research. I for one am going to write my congressman and senators and tell them to vote for S. 2695...
Incidently, you should read the rest of Kambiz's post...
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