The UK House of Commons has its dander up. Having bloodied the prime minister over Syria in the past fortnight, the select committee of MPs that oversees the work of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has issued a report that is heavily critical of the government’s policy on open access (OA). The report was published early this morning so I have had time only to skim through the conclusions and recommendations, but it makes

This post has nothing to do with science. Seamus Heany is dead. I am only begining to process what that means to me. I claim no deep knowledge of his poetry but it has been with me for a long time. I studied his work at school in the late 1970s; I have a few of his books of poems and prose on my shelves; I saw The Cure at Troy at the Tricycle theatre in 1991; I heard him speak once — when I was a postdoc in Boston in 1994.

I observed recently how the rise of the internet has eliminated letter writing and so caused some of the wells of correspondence that historians and biographers have relied on down through the ages to fall into disuse. But the internet is not all bad as far as reaching into the past is concerned. In fact, it can preserve and propagate memories in ways that are a huge improvement on what went before. We forget every day how lucky we are.

“…price rises coupled with high profits, mis-selling scandals […] and a lack of transparency over bills have destroyed consumers’ trust […], a committee of MPs has said in a report that also criticises the sector’s watchdog for failing to take … Continue reading →

This post has been written simply to point you to an interesting series of interviews that Richard Poynder has published on his blog with a range of stakeholders in the open access arena. So far he has mostly interviewed advocates, but as anyone knows who has spent more than twenty minutes on this topic, open access is a broad church.

Having devoted a fair number of the words on this blog to open access over the past year and a half, I have found myself invited to an increasing number of meetings on the topic. Whether run by RLUK, the Royal Society or the LSE, these meetings have invariably been interesting, but they often seem to bring together many of the same people, mostly from libraries, funders, publishers and learned societies.

Twelve months after the publication of the Finch Report, during which the new RCUK policy on open access has been published, dissected, debated (including by committees in both Houses of Parliament), revised and implemented, it seems an apposite moment to step back and take stock. A collection of essays published today under the title Debating Open Access presents one attempt to do just that.

Yesterday I went to Mars. I stood on the surface and gazed at the dusty red ground, illuminated as far as the pink horizon by sunlight weakened from a journey that is a 100 million kilometres longer than the distance to planet Earth.

I had never heard of James Salter till I read a profile of him in the Observer a couple of weeks ago, on the occasion of the publication of his latest book, his first in a long time. Salter is 87 and has produced only six novels, two collections of short stories and a memoir in a writing career that has spanned six decades. He wrote his first novel following his time as a fighter pilot in the Korean War.

Regulars at this blog will be familiar with the dim view that I have of impact factors, in particular their mis-appropriation for the evaluation of individual researchers and their work. I have argued for their elimination, in part because they act as a brake on the roll-out of open access publishing but mostly because of the corrosive effect they have on science and scientists.

In Reinventing Discovery Michael Nielsen says that one of the great things about the Internet is the way it can connect problems with problem-solvers. Well, let’s see if that’s true. I have a problem with Excel, or rather, with a particular spreadsheet that I would like someone to solve elegantly. You can download a version of my spreadsheet here. The image below shows the contents.