The open access buzz around the internet last week was all due to the announcement by senior faculty at Harvard that journal subscription prices were rising at an unsustainable rate and the call to colleagues to devote their publishing energies to open access titles.

This is astonishing. Harvard is one of the best and one of the wealthiest universities in the world but last week its Faculty Advisory Council* announced that it can no longer afford to maintain its subscriptions to academic journals. The announcement was made online by the Council as a message to the academic staff at the university. I have taken the liberty of quoting it in full below.

Scientists’ quest for publication in journals with high impact factors is widely perceived as one of the more refractory barriers to the fuller adoption of open access, which I believe to be in the best interests of science. But the barrier problem is complicated.

What’s your favourite colour? Anyone who has socialised with small children will have been confronted with this serious-faced interrogation at some point. It’s the sort of question that erupts as soon as young kids learn to verbalise the jumble of perceptions filling up minds that are untidier than bedrooms. It’s the sort of question that is too often discarded in the mis-named process of growing up. So what do you answer? Blue? Green?

Here is a ‘paper‘ that I think would not be accepted by PLoS ONE and yet it was the subject of a report on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning, arguably the nation’s premier morning news show. Please have a listen. It’s 3 minutes and 51 seconds long. And it’s unbelievable. The radio report describes findings in a new paper by Professor Brian J Ford that call into question the ability of large dinosaurs to move around on land.

I had an argument with my colleague in the tea-room the other day. Gratifyingly, I learned he had been reading my blogposts on the subject of open access, but it soon became clear he did not entirely share my enthusiasm for the topic. Specifically, he criticised open access journals such as PLoS ONE both for their lack of sub-editorial services and for creating a home for poor quality science.

Tonight, at the end of an exhausting day, I have few words, but it was beautifully clear so I have taken some pictures of the night sky. And made a short film. The photographs are by no means exemplary. The shots of Orion are not pin sharp. The Moon and Venus are both over-exposed so you cannot see their phases. To the naked eye the moon was only a quarter full – as is apparent in the video below;

If Elsevier calculated that its withdrawal of support for the Research Works Act (RWA) would neutralise the arguments stirred up around academic publishing, I think the company is mistaken.

It has been a long and winding road but tonight the journey towards libel reform in England and Wales paused in the historic Great Hall of the Inner Temple to take stock. The wheels are turning and the machine of government is moving slowly in the right direction. The coalition came to power with a promise of reform. A parliamentary committee has met to consider the case for change and reported their findings last October.

Scientists should do this. Journalists should do that. And eventually we will live in a world where the media reporting of science achieves perfection. At least that is the hypothesis. The hypothesis was put to the test at the Royal Institution last night in a discussion organised by Alok Jha and chaired by Alice Bell.