In the UK the parliamentary House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology is conducting an enquiry into the implementation of the government’s policy on open access.

Response to House of Lords Science and Technology Committee Call for Evidence on Open Access

On Tuesday evening I was asked by Research Professional News for my views on a new report from think tank UKDayOne, which is calling for the abolition of the Research Excellence Framework, unlovingly known as the REF. The report is provocative and interesting. It has won loud support from one Dominic Cummings.

Abandon the REF?

“The Ruffian” is great title for Ian Leslie’s Substack given his predilection for roughing up lazy thinking.

Misreading on the tube leads to WAR “The Ruffian” is great title for Ian Leslie’s Substack given his predilection for roughing up lazy thinking. I first came across him as the author of “Conflicted”, an excellent book about how to disagree constructively, a practice he frequently deploys in his

 Ruffian

pieces. I sometimes disagree with Leslie, but not often enough to stop me paying the £4 monthly subscription to his Substack.

On the Freedom of Misunderstanding of Speech

I have been trying to put my finger on why I have found Succession — HBO’s must-see series about fictional US media mogul Logan Roy and his dysfunctional family — to be at once utterly compelling and annoyingly dissatisfying.

Tom and Roman – trapped by farce? I have been trying to put my finger on why I have found

 Succession

— HBO’s must-see series about fictional US media mogul Logan Roy and his dysfunctional family — to be at once utterly compelling and annoyingly dissatisfying. The show has an excellent pedigree.

Why Succession failed me &#8211; just

One final look back before I turn to face 2022. Following a practice started last year, I have maintained a thread of tweet-sized reviews of the books that I read in 2021 – all of them. The Twitter thread of the books I read in 2021. Click on the image to see the high-res version. There are only eighteen in total, a singularly unimpressive tally – fewer even than I managed in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Books of the Year

I can’t remember how I came across this video from philosopher Alain de Botton, but I feel seen. Like many academics, I guess, I have always prized scholarly achievement.

To be or not to be exceptional?

My computer tells me that I took over 2,400 photographs in 2020. Here are my favourites. I’m afraid I have failed to whittle them down to fewer than seventy-five. Click on the first image, taken on a winter walk on the first of January, to go to the album on flickr.    2020 was the year of lockdown, but we still managed to get out and about on occasion.

Photographs of 2020

Since its announcement on 4th September the European Commission’s plan to make a radical shift towards open access (OA) has caused quite a stir. Backed by eleven* national funding agencies, the plan aims to make the research that they support free to read as soon as it is published.

Academic freedom and responsibility: why Plan S is not unethical

The Royal Institution has made a rather lovely film about William and Lawrence Bragg, the father and son Nobel laureates who came up the method of structural analysis by X-ray crystallography around 100 years ago. The film is constructed around an interview with Lawrence Bragg’s daughter Patience, a delightful lady who has very fond memories of her father and some wonderful stories about him.

The very interesting web of connections

Last week, having quickly digested the executive summary of the Finch Report on open access (OA), I told you it was complicated. I’ve now read the report in its entirety, along with a large swathes of blogospheric commentary. I’m still decidedly of the view that it’s complicated but I wanted to think through some of the initial responses. In particular, I’d like to try to address the vexed issue of costs.

Finch Report: the question of costs

Last night, having rounded off a busy week with a day of manual labour helping to repair my mother-in-law’s kitchen floor, I retired to bed early with the newspaper. Saturday’s

 Guardian

, if you want to know. It was delightful. I hadn’t taken the time to read the paper for ages and was pleased to rediscover that singular pleasure. Unfortunately, it’s a pleasure that is unlikely to endure.

Perusing the Papers

What is the best seminar that you have ever attended? And what made it so good? I pondered this question after my name appeared on the list of speakers for our internal divisional seminar series this term. I thought that, rather than give another run-of-the-mill progress report, I might have a little fun with the format. And perhaps make a useful point at the same time.

The Best Seminar?

I was banging on last week about how scientists should use words rather than guns during public engagement. Words are safer — and often more effective. But they are not

 completely

safe. In fact, they can sometimes be rather dangerous, especially when used without due care and attention in England and Wales, where the libel laws take a keen interest in the words of any unsuspecting author.

You may not be interested in this but this is interested in you

I am 46 years of age and I have just discovered Jupiter. This is a surprising revelation, even to me. I have strong memories of being a child besotted with things astronomical. Looking back now, however, I have to wonder at the superficiality of my interests. I was certainly a devotee of space and space rockets.

I have discovered Jupiter

I am determined to finish the third and final installment of the posts about my vacation reading before the holiday season comes to an end — which I think is tonight. I want to tell you about the biography of Huxley and Eric Ambler’s

 Uncommon Danger

. Truth be told I have been struggling with this post.

Beachbooks 3: Uncommon science and danger

Thanks to the very good offices of Matt Brown, who knows everything about everything happening in London, I found myself at the Smithfield Gallery last night. Jenny, Richard and myself joined Matt there to gaze at Luke Jerram’s artful glassy virus sculptures.

Virus Illusion Confusion

I love pictures. And photographs. Unlike some, I can’t paint or draw with any great skill, but in common with many other people I get immense pleasure from photography. I’m no expert and wouldn’t even consider myself a serious hobbyist, but I have been known to enjoy composing and capturing an image with my little compact camera. Here’s one I took the weekend before last when we were at Brighton.

Picture perfect?

The Guardian runs an interesting ‘”Writer’s Rooms” feature in its Review section every Saturday in which a writer (or sometimes an artist) discusses a photograph of their office or workroom, pointing out significant objects. The idea (as in Desert Island Discs) is to gain an oblique insight into the subject’s mindset. Well, it’s hardly an original idea but wouldn’t be interesting to take the same approach with scientists?

Scientific Spaces and Places

I have been thinking about this for a quite while, but finally got a kick up the backside. And now it’s done. With two members of my group I’ve put together a short movie on our research and, thanks to the good folks at Nature Network who enabled video embedding just last week, it is presented here for your… delectation? What can I tell you?

Six minutes of your life (Updated)

Thanks to the paucity of my education and cultural life I have come late to Isaiah Berlin, the noted philosopher and historian of ideas whose thinking provided such a guiding light to the 20th Century. But I’m definitely a fan now. I’d heard the name, of course, but would have been hard-pressed to tell you why he was well-known.

Intelligent life: Isaiah Berlin

Well this is nice. The Celebrating Crystallography video made last year by the Royal Institution, which I narrated and helped to script-edit, has won the the EuroScience New Media award. Full details are available on the RI blog but it’s great to see a project come to such fruition.

Prize-winning video

Another year, another two thousand or more photographs, some of which I thought were quite good. There’s a little taster below but if you want to see the full set of 55 pictures that were my favourites from this year, you need to click through to my album on Flickr. Silhouetted Robin. Louvre Reflections. Colourful Communication Barcelona Balcony The Circle of Light. No Cafe Society in Autumn.

Photos of 2022

Just three weeks ago, on eve of the weekend, my wife and I met an old friend for dinner at a restaurant in Southwark. Even then, the most normal things in the world were beginning to feel risky. Our friend works for Public Health England, but even if he hadn’t, the conversation would still probably have locked onto the coronavirus pandemic.

Three weeks

I’m rather late getting round to this but, for the record, here is a piece I wrote for Research Fortnight in late November on the challenges that preprints pose to embargoed press releases of research reports.  The tl;dr version (though the piece is only 800 words!) is that the benefits of preprints very likely outweigh the convenience of embargoes.

ICYMI No. 9: Preprints and Embargoes

For the longest time I have been meaning to get back to—ugh!—blogging. Regular readers, should any remain, will see that this is the first post of 2022. I haven’t broken any promises with the hiatus and have no excuses to make. I’ve been busy. I know – who

 hasn’t

been busy in UK academia? Nevertheless, the first half of this year was intense, with several major deadlines that left little mental spare capacity.

Message for my reader

Since I have developed a habit of writing elsewhere, which necessarily takes time and words away from the blog here at Reciprocal Space, I thought I would try to make amends by developing the habit of linking to the pieces that appear in other corners of the internet.  To kick off therefore, permit me to alert you to a short article this week published in The Biologist, the house magazine of the Royal Society of Biology.

ICYMI No.1: Preprints for biologists

Neuroscience isn’t really my thing, so when my teenage daughter came asking for suggestions of a good popular book on the subject I took to Twitter. Several people kindly made suggestions, while others asked to be notified of the outcome of my quest. It seems to be a popular subject. Here, in no particular order are the titles that were offered.

Popular neuroscience book suggestions

What is it about living through a pandemic that has quelled the motivation to write? I suspect it may have something to do with the unstructuring of time, or rather its reduction through confinement to rhythms dulled by repetition. Whatever the reason, a quick glance through the log of posts here over the past year reveals a loss of activity – or is it a loss of discipline?

In the garden

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.

Open access on the conference circuit

Writing in The Observer a couple of weeks ago, Kenan Malik cast a sceptical eye over a report published by the history group at Imperial College that had been asked to reflect on “the current understanding and reception of the College’s legacy and heritage in the context of its present-day mission.” Linking the report’s controversial recommendation that that the Huxley Building be renamed because of Thomas Henry Huxley’s views on race to the

The Huxley Question

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.

Follower

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.

Richard Poynder asks: where are we with open access?

A round-up of some of the issues that got an airing during Open Access (OA) Week and in the days that followed, including more rumination on the implementation and implications of the RCUK OA policy, more bad (and some good) publisher behaviour, ideas for new directions in OA publishing and, finally, an important African perspective on the rumbling debate.


 The start of open access week

From 22-28 October

That was the open access week that was

The firework screamed upwards into the night sky and burst, with an almighty crack, into a vibrant spray of light and colour. ﻿Everyone looked up. Some people cheered. And then the murmur of conversation resumed. Is that what happened with the Science is Vital campaign, which bloomed and boomed in the UK this past September and October?

Science is Vital: Perturbation Theory and Practice

I attended last year’s Science Blogging conference very much as an outsider. I’d signed on at Nature Network and passed a few comments, but was not a blogger. However, the event was a turning point for me and in the warm flush of excitement that emanated from the conference, I finally decided to jump into the strange reality known as the blogosphere.

What a difference a year makes

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.

Sick of Impact Factors

The Finch Committee, set up last year by David Willetts to examine how UK-funded research ﬁndings can be made more accessible — and mentioned by the minister in his speech on the subject earlier this week — has been meeting regularly and is due to report within weeks. If you would like to find out more about the committee’s deliberations, you can.

Access to the Finch Committee on Open Access

Short Version

Please read the Wellcome Trust’s policy on open access. And then adopt it. Thank you.

 Long Version

Please read the Wellcome Trust’s policy on open access. It’s short so I’ve pasted it below. The policy states (with my emphases in purple): As a policy it is clear and purposeful. It is built upon the principle that OA is good for science and good for the public.

An Open Letter on Open Access to UK Research Councils

Those of you who have read all 346 posts on my Reciprocal Space blog will have no need to read this one. You probably already have a sense of what I do and what I’m like – my science, my hobbies, my hobby-horses, and my foibles.  But on the off chance that you’re new here, or are a faithful reader who just can’t get enough, here is an interview I did with The Free Think Tank. I say ‘interview’ though this was no Michael Parkinson affair.

Interview with the author

I promise I

 won’t

make a habit of just posting links to stuff on other sites but I am childishly proud of having a piece about macromolecular crystallography in the Guardian Science Blog.

Monsters in the details

I once read in a physics textbook that if an atom were to be magnified to the size of London’s Wembley Stadium, the nucleus at the centre would be about as big as a hazelnut. Well screw that, because I can think of

 much

better uses for Wembley Stadium. Besides the obvious — football — it is of course an ideal venue for rock concerts and last Friday night U2 showed exactly how it should be done.

Music in a nutshell

It has been a quiet week in lab woebegone*. Though we have been working to pack up everything for a move across campus in mid-January, Christmas has intervened to scatter us to our homes, where traditionally we have the time to reflect on the year just past and galvanise ourselves for the one to come. Except that this year I haven’t had the time.

Work and Energy

There was a very nice piece in yesterday’s

 Nature

by Ananyo Bhattacharya (a former PhD student of mine who now works for the journal). Ananyo discusses the current structural ‘wish list’ with some of the world’s most ambitious protein crystallographers. Perhaps I’m a little biased but I think it’s beautifully written.

Desirous of structures?

Simon Singh is a brave man. He has announced that he is going to apply to appeal in his case with the British Chiropractic Association. He writes about the background to the case here. Simultaneously, Sense About Science is launching its Keep the Libel Laws out of Science Campaign. It should be widely reported in the UK media today.

Keep the Libel Laws out of Science

Taking my cue from Ben Goldacre’s comments at SciBlog08, I’d like to unleash the power of the blogosphere.

Blog power in the service of science?

On Wednesday last I was fortunate to find myself an outlier among the great and the good at the Wellcome Trust Image Awards for 2011, where hefty glass slabs were being handed out by Adam Rutherford as prizes to imaginative individuals who had conjured a captivating image from their scientific work.

Prize Your Imagination

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Dublin Airport,” says the pilot. “Please remember to turn your watches back thirty years.”  So goes the time-worn joke but last weekend that’s more or less exactly what I did. I flew to Dublin to hear a band I first saw in concert in the summer of 1977 when I was just thirteen years old. It was a little bit crazy but I’m glad I went — I was not the least bit disappointed.

Time Travel

Load. Aim. Fire!!!!! Grant application submitted. Who knows what will happen? If you feel moved to comment, please do so randomly. I’m all out of evidence and logic.

Ceci n&#8217;est pas un blogpost

Today it is my signal honour to have a guest post on @JackofKent‘s most excellent blog. It examines the understanding of the nature of scientific evidence set out in the Court of Appeal’s recent ruling on the libel case brought by the British Chiropractic Association against science writer, Dr Simon Singh. In my opinion, the stance taken by the Court is pleasingly

 scientific

.

JoK-ing Apart

The twitterverse has been alive this morning with the wonderful news that Simon Singh has been granted leave to appeal Justice Eady’s ruling in the libel case that the British Chiropractic Association had brought against the popular science author. See here and here for some background to the case. The news is all the more wonderful because it was so unexpected.

Breaking News: Singh granted leave to appeal

Who is that stranger in my father’s bed? Those sunken eyes The concave cheeks Salted with stubble The thinned grey hair Plastered to a narrow skull. I have lost the man I loved. In truth it had been a long journey To this resting place. A slow stepping backwards As memory stuttered and stalled And confusion dampened The flares of anger That made strangers of us both.

The separation of life and death

This is a guest post by Pete Binfield and Jason Hoyt, co-founders of the open access journal PeerJ. I don’t make a habit of running posts from private companies here at Reciprocal Space but have been impressed by the innovative model of open access publishing that PeerJ represents and was glad to be able to provide them with a forum to expound on their publishing philosophy. No payment was made or requested.

A vision for a better future &#8211; using new tools of openness and transparency to improve the scientific process

With emails running alongside, barking for attention, we beat a retreat from London. The clamour of work was soon swamped by the heat and light and sights and sounds and smells of Barcelona, and by the newness and oldness of it all. In the evening as we wandered the narrow streets in a desultory Google search for a restaurant, the continental warmth seeped into our bodies like a muscle relaxant.

To the sea

You’d think assessing bicycles would be a lot easier than assessing researchers, but I’m not so sure. Though I spend quite a bit of time as chair of the DORA steering committee pondering how best to evaluate research and researchers, this weekend I’m mainly preoccupied with rethinking my commuting options. When in 2004 we moved to our current house, a 25 min walk from the station, I used to cycle for that leg of my journey to and from work.

A Declaration on Bicycle Assessment

New Year’s Eve is almost upon us, so here we are again at the close of one long year and the start of another. Personally, it has been a year of endings and beginnings. Readers of this blog would be forgiven for thinking that it is one of the things that I have wound down in 2018, but in fact I am hoping to stir it to new life.

 Sunrise or sunset?

Endings and Beginnings

The post below was written as a comment on

Lizzie Gadd’s recent post

 explaining in some detail Loughborough University decision to base their approach to research assessment more on the Leiden Manifesto than DORA, the Declaration on Research Assessment. So you should read that first! (The comment is currently ‘in moderation’ because, like myself, Lizzie is on holiday.

DORA, the Leiden Manifesto &amp; a university’s right to choose: a comment

Dear Publishers Association  I ask that you amend the open access decision tree you created for incorporation into the guidance notes accompanying the Open Access (OA) policy announced by Research Councils UK (RCUK) in 2013. It may seem odd to ask for a correction so late in the day but my reasons for doing so are two-fold.

Open letter to the Publishers Association: please amend your open access decision tree

Regular readers of this blog will be probably be aware of the ongoing campaign to reform the libel laws of England and Wales. These laws have pernicious effects in many aspects of public life — including science and medicine. They place a dangerous constriction on the freedom of scientists and medics to engage in robust debate on matters of  public interest.

Libel Reform &#8211; where are we?

I spent most of last weekend and all of yesterday finalising a chapter I had been asked to contribute to an upcoming monograph on human serum albumin. Monograph is a fancy word for book in academia. And academia is a fancy word for the people who work in universities and research institutes and consider themselves smart. Yesterday I was polishing the text of my latest draft and assembling the figures.

Transport of Delight

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?

Open Access Juggernaut Hits London

Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympic Games spread a warm glow through liberal hearts. His imaginative sweep over British history and culture, which managed to be both reverent and irreverent, was filled with a human chaos that constituted a nicely judged response to the shock and awe of the massed ranks who launched the Beijing games.

&#8220;You can&#8217;t read this book&#8221; but you should

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.

The road well trodden

I was back at the Diamond Light Source today — the synchrotron that we use to blast protein crystals with X-rays to figure out the structures of protein molecules. The beamlines at the synchrotron where we do our experiments have some very fancy kit and, in explaining the apparatus to one of my students, I was reminded of how much things have changed in the past twenty years.

The Speed of X-rays

I have little to say this evening apart from reporting that I came home tonight and caught the new moon before it dipped behind the trees. Thought some of you might want to have a look.

 Moon over Kent

And my daughter and I espied the Orion Nebula; unfortunately my photographic equipment is not up to recording that. 	But this astronomy lark is

 the business

.

New Moon

It looks like SciBlog08 was very much ahead of the curve in issuing the call for more scientists  to get involved in blogging. A former student (thanks Ananyo) has just drawn my attention to an open access article on science blogging that has appeared in this month’s PLOS Biology.

Catching the zeitgeist

It’s less than 24 hours, so this still counts as a timely post. I guess I had been primed because I had been thinking about it. But although I hadn’t set my alarm I found myself awake at 02:52 on Monday morning – I can still see the digital display – and so I got up, checked out the window that the moon was visible (it was – and already mostly eclipsed), dressed and hurried downstairs, grabbing my camera and binoculars on the way.

Lunacy and sanity

Update (17:00 03 Mar):

all members of the UK or international scientific community were invited to indicate their support by signing the letter. The opportunity to do so closed at 17:00 UK time on 03 March. The final tally of signatories was 3494 (please see bottom of post for the full list).  Earlier today, I sent the letter below to Professor Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society.

An open letter to the President of the Royal Society &#8211; time to stand up for your values

What the hell is Stanley Kubrick’s

 2001: A Space Odyssey

about? I’m sure I don’t know. I’m really, really sure I don’t know.

Movement and Music

Science has been extraordinarily successful at taking the measure of the world, but paradoxically the world finds it extraordinarily difficult to take the measure of science — or any type of scholarship for that matter. That is not for want of trying, as any researcher who has submitted a PhD thesis for examination or a manuscript for publication or an application for funding will know.

The REF: what is the measure of success?

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.

Tripped up by the light fantastic

“The Queen is dead; long live the King!” is such a cliché of stories and films that it was surprising to hear it for real. Not that we did

 actually

hear it for real. The secrecy surrounding the Queen’s final hours means we cannot be sure what was said at the moment of her passing or even if the new King had arrived in time.

Passing the Baton

Apologies, this will be obvious to some, but I have seen enough so-so images on social media to convince me there are others who could post much better pictures if they took just a little bit more care. Smartphone cameras are so good these days that everyone is a photographer. But clearly, everyone

 isn’t

a photographer.

Compose yourself

“May you live in interesting times”, goes the Chinese curse. Chinese scientists are certainly living in interesting times (as reported today in

 Nature

) but they are unlikely to see it as a curse. The budget of the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) has increased sevenfold since 1998 and is set — as part of bold plans — to rise 70% in the coming year.

Interesting Times

Henry started it by banging on about his iPad. Somehow the subject of blogging came up and I mentioned the BlogPress app, so here I am testing it out. I used it once on MT4 but this is my first go on WordPress. Seems OK so far…  Second, what exactly is this thing called Quora? I came across it on Twitter earlier in the week and, like a social media addict, signed up straight away. Quite a few other people seem to have done the same thing.

Padding times three

For the longest time I thought he was French. It’s the name — Joule; it

 sounds

French and in my physics class at school no-one thought to explain otherwise. In fact, Joule was not even introduced as a name — the word was simply handed to us as the SI unit of energy, a replacement for Calorie who, for all I knew, might also have been from France.

Joule&#8217;s Jewel

What was your carbon footprint for 2019? Mine was more of a bootprint, almost entirely because of flying. International travel has long been considered one of the perks of academic life, something that lifted the job out of the ordinary and cemented our membership of a trans-national community of scientists and scholars.

My carbon bootprint

Recognition and Redistribution for Imperial College’s Community This is a guest post by my former colleague, Dr Rahma (Red) Elmahdi, in which she lays our her reaction to the Imperial College History Report, and in particular the recommendation to rename the Huxley … Continue reading →

Recognition and Redistribution for Imperial College’s Community
 


 This is a guest post by my former colleague,
 
 Dr Rahma (Red) Elmahdi
 
 , in which she lays our her reaction to the Imperial College History Report, and in particular the recommendation to rename the Huxley Building. I am grateful to Red for allowing me to share her perspective.

A Reckoning with Huxley’s Legacy

I’ve already shared this video on Twitter and Facebook but wanted to post it here as a more permanent record. Two weeks ago I fulfilled the ambition, held since I had seen Nic Stacey’s and Jim Al-Khalili’s quite wonderful BBC documentary on thermodynamics, to visit the steam engines at the Crossness sewage pumping station.

The Cathedral on the Marsh

It’s the name of this blog. But why? Well, in Web2.0-land, a blog (can you hear my teeth grinding?) is quintessentially a space for the reciprocation of views, the exchange of ideas. So far, so good, but the title is also a rather cheesy crystallographic pun because reciprocal space is a

 real

thing.

What the hell is Reciprocal Space?

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.

The Hunters

The Science is Vital Campaign has caught the grim mood of the scientific community and focused the energy of opposition to light a fire of protest.

Rally to the Cause of Science

Nerds

Many of you will already have seen this because I have been promoting it shamelessly on twitter. But this is the video of the talk I mentioned in a post back in March that my daughter Eleanor gave on a topic she feels passionately about: corduroy. I thought it might amuse some of you.

Nerds and Words (about science)

I saw this and thought of you… …Steffi.

Thunderbirds are go!

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.

Around Downe

It cannot have escaped your attention this past weekend that the Earth was treated to a supermoon. The correct terminology for this felicitous event is a perigee syzygy, but the reasons for the interesting nomenclature need not detain us.  The point is that Saturday night was clear in London and gave those of us who live there a magnificent view:    Which, just like a lunar orbit, brings me to a place I’ve been before.

Moon Boon

It is the weekend and I have been treating myself to some time with the paper. Usually, I buy the Saturday Guardian. On occasion I will also get The Observer on a Sunday but most weekends I don’t have the time to absorb both. Sometimes even one newspaper is too much. The book review section is a particular favourite and one of the reasons I have switched away from the digital version of the paper that is served on the web.

Ways of Seeing

I should have done this a long time ago but I was too proud. I think I need to review. In 2002 Dan Carter published a paper in BBRC describing the crystal structure of the protein, human serum albumin, complexed with hemin.

I&#8217;m reviewing the situation

Two more book reviews from my reading list for this year. On several occasions while reading

 Being Mortal

, surgeon Atul Gawande’s book about end-of-life care, I could feel a lump swelling in my throat and tears behind my eyes pressing for release. I’m not an emotional type but this is an intense book. The intensity is surprising since Gawande’s lucid style is very matter of fact.

Being mortal and being Crick

Your royal Highness, members of the Academy, esteemed colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, it is a great and singular honour for me to accept the Nobel prizes for physics, chemistry and medicine.

My Nobel prize acceptance speech, 2010

After publishing my round-up of the books I’d read in 2015, the author Christopher Edge got in touch via twitter to offer a review copy of his new book,

 The Many Worlds of Albie Bright

. It’s a short novel for children which has an ambitious amount of science threaded into the plot. At the beginning of the story young Albie has just lost his physicist mum to cancer.

Review: The Many Worlds of Albie Bright

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a researcher in possession of interesting experimental results, must be in want of a journal with a high impact factor. It is also true – and widely understood – that journal impact factors (JIFs) are unreliable indicators of the quality of individual research papers.

Pride and Prejudice and journal citation distributions

Last Friday night as I watched U2 play Glastonbury on TV, the stream of hatred on Twitter was relentless. A torrent of unforgettable ire. I’ve long known that Bono and his band excite very mixed reactions, but this seemed to take things higher. Their music is not to everyone’s taste but on this occasion the bilious flood stemmed from the band’s attitude to taxation, or rather to tax avoidance.

Bono a hypocrite? Good.

It has happened. Yesterday RCUK published the revised guidelines on its new open access policy and, as requested by this blog and everyone who signed up in support, the document (PDF) now includes, on page one no less, a statement that:  RCUK’s Alexandra Saxon was good enough to make particular mention of our request in her blogpost to explain the most significant revisions in the new guidelines.

Impact Factors — the revised RCUK open access guidelines

Today is the tenth anniversary of my very first blog post. When I look back at that day in 2008 when I set out my stall on Reciprocal Space it seems a long time ago and a long distance away. It’s been quite a journey. Some things haven’t changed. I still hate the terminology, though I have mostly managed to swallow my embarrassment.

Ten Years a Blogger

The Society for General Microbiology (SGM) kindly awarded me this year’s Peter Wildy Prize Lecture, which I delivered at their Spring meeting in Liverpool just a few weeks ago. The prize is given for “an outstanding contribution to microbiology education and/or communication in order to stimulate interest and understanding in the subject”. It sounds rather grand, but please don’t be put off.

Get out of the laboratory

When it comes to language, I am a lover

 and

a fighter. I’m no great expert but I know what I like and do try to take a

 bit

of care every time I lay out my little handkerchief of prose here on Nature Network.

Mind your language

Abandoned post

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?

What&#8217;s your favourite colour?

Earlier this week I had an interesting email from Jesse Shore, President of Australian Science Communicators, about a blog post I wrote back in 2010. Jesse has kindly agreed to let me post our brief correspondence so I’ll let him take up the story. To which I replied:  To which Jesse came back:  I very much agree with him: something to build on for sure.

From the pedestal &#8211; take 3

Week two of “I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here!” is now upon me. This week the evictions start, so the competition is hotting up.  I had meant to get around to writing a blog-post about week one, but I have been preoccupied with more pressing matters – like getting ready for week two. I hope to serve up a digest of my experiences of this public engagement once the hurly burly of the week is over.

Reciprocal Space

What the hell is Reciprocal Space?

I hate blogs, bloggers and blogging