Around Downe, Sept 2012, a set on Flickr. I visited Downe yesterday. Darwin’s home village is quite close to where I live and we like to avail ourselves from time to time of the local environs and the local (which is called the George and Dragon). I had my camera with me. If you will indulge me, I am experimenting here with the link between my flickr account and my blog.
Everyone’s talking about open access (OA). It has been a year of dramatic developments in the drive to liberate access to the research literature and the blogosphere is buzzing with excited chatter. Well, perhaps not everyone and not even the whole of the blogosphere. It’s important not to get too carried away. I wonder how much in the online discussion has spilled over into common rooms and group meetings around the world?
It is a year to the day since the release of my film, “I’m a Scientist“, in which six different scientists talk openly about their lives in the laboratory and what makes them tick. The aim of the film is very much to cut through the myth that all scientists are heroes and geniuses. To mark this first anniversary and to make the film more useful in the classroom, I have split it into ten bite-sized chunks.
Everyone of a certain pretension likes to think they have a book inside them. I know I do. But I’ve looked and I can’t find it. Maybe it’s in there somewhere but at too early a stage of germination to be visible. All I know is that I have searched and come up wanting. The situation is made all the more galling by the fact that everyone I meet these days seems either to have written a book or to be in the midst of producing one.
A resonant blogpost is the gift that keeps on giving. One of the latest comments in my Sick of Impact Factors polemic bemoaning the corrosive effects of journal impact factors on scientific lives provided a link to a quite wonderful paper. I missed Alexis Verger’s comment when it dropped into my blog on August 31st.
It’s not even two months since the tectonic plates shifted underneath academic publishing in the UK. But in the few weeks since the government’s response to the Finch report and the announcement of the new open access (OA) policy of the UK Research Councils (RCUK), the ground has settled. The contours of the new landscape can be more clearly discerned but still lack definition in places.
If you thought I was done open access, think again. The taunting of the journal impact factor beast in recent posts was necessary because it is blocking the path to free dissemination of the research literature and the omnivorous creature has somehow to be slain.
My ‘Sick of Impact Factors‘ blog post seems to have struck much more of a chord than I anticipated. At the time of writing it has attracted over 12,900 page views and 460 tweets, far higher than my usual tallies. The post also generated over 130 comments, which is a daunting number for anyone who now stumbles across the post;
I am sick of impact factors and so is science. The impact factor might have started out as a good idea, but its time has come and gone. Conceived by Eugene Garfield in the 1970s as a useful tool for research libraries to judge the relative merits of journals when allocating their subscription budgets, the impact factor is calculated annually as the mean number of citations to articles published in any given journal in the two preceding years.
Well this is nice. Today Occam’s Typewriter opens a new cornershop, so to speak, at the Guardian. For me, this closes a social media circle that started over four years ago because I can trace my entry to the scientific blogosphere to the time I heard someone called Jennifer Rohn talking about ‘Lablit’ – literature threaded with science and scientists – on the Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast.