I’ve had it up to here with this misconception.  I just read it yet again, this time in a letter to the editor of the New York Times in response to Michael Eisen’s recent piece in that paper on the RWA.  The letter says some good things, but then right in the middle we have this: This is just one more example of a pernicious and persistent assumption.

Although I’m on record of being no fan of the tabloids, there’s no doubt that they are hugely influential.  So it has to be good news to find that in the last few hours, both Nature and Science have publicly come out against the Research Works Act.

Just a quick note that my article Academic publishers have become the enemies of science is now up on the Guardian’s Science Blog.  Spread the word! (You’re welcome to comment here, of course, but if you post your comments on the Guardian site, they will be much more widely read.

In an article that many of you will now have seen, Heather Morrison demonstrated the enormous profits of STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) scholarly publishers.  The figures are taken from her in-progress dissertation which in turn cites an article in The Economist.  It all checks out.  I emphasise this because I found the figures so hard to believe.

Most of you will know that the major US science-funding agencies require the work they fund (from the public purse) to be made available as open-access to the public that funded it.  And it’s hard for me to imagine anyone sees that requirement as anything other than straightforwardly just.

We’re starting the new year with a new feature, in which we answer questions that have come our way. We never had a policy about not answering questions, it’s just that previous ones have tended to arrive in the comments section and have been dealt with there. But suddenly in the last few days I’ve gotten two questions from extrabloggular sources, and rather than hide the replies I thought I’d make them available to all.

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And so we come, rather belatedly, to the fourth and final part of this series on preparing and giving talks at scientific conferences.  If you’ve followed the previous installments, you should have figured out a clear, compelling story that you want to tell from your research; you should have clear slides with striking, relevant images and no visual distractions;