MDPI publishes on quite a range of subjects – sampling the title list I find aerospace, agriculture, antibodies, crystals, entropy, genes, environment, molecular sciences, materials, remote sensing, and viruses. They have quite a few biomedical titles, though many of these are new and hence small at present.

Their fees vary quite a bit. Articles in new journals are published free of charge, but otherwise the fees range from CHF 300 to CHF 1800.

Are they a reputable publisher?  The answer seems to be ‘yes’, though perhaps their marketing can be overzealous. MDPI is a member of OASPA, which suggests strongly that they are reputable. Their journals are not high impact journals maybe but it seems they are serious publishers wanting to serve science.

Later that day I spotted someone I knew who worked for Elsevier and said “Hello”.  He said – “Ah, so it was you out running this morning?” and I admitted it was. We chatted about the terrible wind, and this and that.  He used to be our Elsevier rep, dealing with our annual subscription renewals, but he now has a more strategic role in the global sales team. I asked an innocent question about the rumours earlier this year that Elsevier were to buy up Mendeley. “That rumour seems to have died down – I wonder if it was just someone at Mendeley flying a kite? It seemed an odd idea to me.” He professed to having no inside knowledge, and said that decisions like that were taken higher up in the company.

Well. The conference first day went by quickly – there’s always plenty of interest at UKSG – and in the evening I met up with a conference buddy for a few beers, getting back to my hotel fairly late.  I checked my email just after midnight and I found one message titled “Team Mendeley Joins Elsevier”.

The next morning, I couldn’t be sure whether I had dreamed that news or it had really happened. Was it a beer-induced nightmare?  I looked again and found a twitter-storm to confirm that it had really happened.

Back at the conference I saw my Elsevier contact again and he apologised that he hadn’t been able to be completely truthful with me – the deal was just in the process of being signed on Monday and he was sworn to secrecy until it was officially announced. I did quiz him a little about the implications for Mendeley. I had seen that Victor Henning was to have a title like “Vice-President for Strategy” within Elsevier.  My contact told me that the idea was not that Elsevier would change the culture of Mendeley, but that Mendeley would change the culture of Elsevier. I tried not to look too sceptical. I find it hard to believe that, but perhaps there is a real desire within Elsevier to change.  We will have to wait and see.

Later in the day I chatted with other library colleagues about the implications of the sale. We agreed that perhaps it was not highly significant for the majority of Mendeley users.  While Mendeley has been the poster boy for open access in some quarters, I think that many users adopt it because it is a useful tool to help with storing references and preparing bibliographies. They just want it to do a job for them, not for it to change the world. This will not change under the new owners.

Lab sign

Balance

Visitors’ book

There was a slight mix-up over one other item, an old microscope from ca. 1915, that I had not been able to locate initially. At the last minute we discovered where it was and I hand-carried it down when I attended the exhibition opening on 5 April. It was good to see everything assembled in one exhibition, and there was a wealth of information about the early MRC. The whole thing was nicely designed and proportioned so that it was not overwhelming. The estimable Tilli Tansey gave a fascinating lecture about the Institute and its early development as the MRC’s flagship.

When arranging for the items to be collected the curator also asked whether I could help source some images from an old MRC Special Report: number 77 published in 1923. Well, of course I could. The MRC Special Reports are our pride and joy. This one was a report on rickets in Vienna, with a chapter by Harriette Chick who spent time there at the Kinderklinik. Sewn into the front and back of the report are about a dozen pages of very shiny plates, containing many X-rays of cases of rickets. I think they are some kind of silver-based images, and look quite advanced for that date. The curator wanted two particular X-rays that had been cited in a later research article, and sent me the low-quality images that he had from that later article. But to my inexperienced eye one bone X-ray looks much like another, and as there were about 90 of them altogether it was like looking for a needle in an ossuary. Further research revealed that the images were on Plate 4 and I was able to identify them.

Xray of rickets

Also in the same chapter of the report are many photos of babies, presumably suffering from rickets. When I opened up the book it fell open on these pages, and it was a delightful surprise to see these photos of (mostly) smiling babies from 90 years ago.

My first historical enquirer, in the weeks leading up to Easter, was from a fellow MRC research unit. They asked for help in tracing anyone who had worked with Peter Medawar and who would be prepared to talk to camera, as part of a series of short videos that they are making on the history of transplantation – for the MRC Centenary. This was an easy request to satisfy – two people leapt to mind and a few emails later both had agreed to help out. Peter Medawar is one of the most recognised names from our Institute’s history, and was an extraordinary man. Those who knew and worked with him have great regard for him as a scientist and as a man.

Next I received an email asking about any records of research at the Institute that was relevant to pregnancy testing. This one was not so obvious. The email mentioned Alan Parkes, who worked among other things on reproductive biology but I was not sure whether there was a direct link from his work to pregnancy testing. After a little digging I decided that there probably is something of interest, but I couldn’t guarantee it – the researcher would need to come and look for themselves to decide. It’s not always easy to decide how much digging to do. Partly I feel that it is the enquirer’s job to do the hard digging, but they need to be reassured that it is going to be worth their while before committing time to visit.

A third enquirer emailed from the USA. She was researching into the history of a particular scientific topic for their PhD, and were interested in one of our past scientists and his colleagues in the same Division. I confirmed that we had some material useful for her and she popped over the following week to take a look. I picked out about 15 years’ worth of our (published) annual reports and the same number of years of (unpublished) reports from the Division to the Director. The latter are detailed papers that each member of scientific staff was expected to submit to the Director as a detailed summary of their activity in the previous year. The printed Annual Reports have rather briefer accounts of the research, but give more context with staff lists, photos, and general Institute news. She spent a few hours looking through these, and also spent some time talking to a retired scientist who had known the person in question. At the end of the day I arranged for her to visit another retired scientist living nearby who had worked closely with him. I think she got good value from the visit and will probably be back again to look at more material. I will need to do a bit more work to identify that. I haven’t mentioned the name here because the person is still living, and one needs to be über-discreet in such a case.

My last example is, sadly, of someone who died unexpectedly last month. Michael Sargent was a researcher at the Institute for many years, starting in microbiology but then moving to developmental biology, and devoting much time over the last 20 years to developing our schools outreach programme. Though retired, he continued to help with the schools outreach. He was also an author, and his book Biomedicine and the Human Condition: Challenges, Risks, and Rewards won much praise. Henry Gee commented that it was “a popular science book that deserves to be much better known than it is, partly because it’s the only one I’ve ever read that makes immunology intelligible”.

I worked with him quite a bit over the past dozen years and it came as a real shock to learn of his death. He was uniformly respected for his intellect and enthusiasm and liked for his bonhomie and humour. It was, therefore, a labour of love to assemble an obituary notice for our website. After some digging I found a few basic facts about his career then contacted several of his colleagues who supplied me with their own impressions and experience of Michael. Together they made up a good account.

The history of people is what makes history of science interesting for me, and makes me want to help when enquirers come calling. We have had some great people at the Institute.

Pugh was an estimable character. His full name is Lewis Griffith Cresswell Evans Pugh, and I always think that someone with four forenames deserves some respect. He had an interesting life – he was a climber and a skier (he was selected for the 1936 Winter Olympics skiing team but was unable to take part due to injury). During the second world war he spent time training troops at the School of Mountain Warfare in the Lebanon. Then he joined the MRC and had to be content with the rather lesser hills of Hampstead and Mill Hill, until he became involved with the Everest expedition.

Someone really should write a book about his life … luckily someone has. His daughter, Harriet Tuckey, has devoted several years to researching her father’s life. Her biography of Pugh Everest – The First Ascent: The untold story of Griffith Pugh, the man who made it possible is due to be published in May. Harriet spent some time looking through our archives, at records of the time that he spent working here, and it was she who emailed me this morning to ask if I could track down a rather obscure article related to him. She had seen it somewhere but the exact details had slipped through the cracks of her usually meticulous note-taking. We aim to have copies of most items published by staff from that period, but when I saw what the item was I was a bit dubious:

The Everest Clothing Story, in Uniforms and Industrial Clothing Catalogue (1954)

A clothing catalogue??? I didn’t hold out much hope so I started by checking in Google.  The 1954 catalogue was in fact listed in Google Books, so it is  something that some libraries had collected.  Sadly the content of the book was not accessible online. I was also heartened to see that UCSD libraries (which hold the majority of Pugh’s archives) had a copy of the item in question:

Box 18, Folder 2: Everest Clothing Story, 1954. Reprint, galley proof and correspondence.

Not sure what to expect, I ventured to our dusty library store. There is one catalogue of papers written by MRC staff , covering ca. 1950-1980, with boxes of reprints to match.  I searched and found the article listed under Pugh’s name (which was mildly surprising as the article is not actually by him, though it references his work extensively), but when I checked the appropriate box the reprint was not there. That is not unexpected – not everything in the catalogue has a corresponding physical item. We also have a second, larger, catalogue (and collection) of reprints and pamphlets going back to 1920; this has things of interest to staff but necessarily written by them. The article was listed in this catalogue too and luckily this time the item itself was in the corresponding box. The abstract is below.

I couldn’t help but feel a debt of gratitude to those cataloguers and typists nearly 60 years ago who had produced the index cards, and to the accurate filers who had placed the reprint in the correct box. Their painstaking work back then made it possible for me to supply the item to Harriet.

The article explains how Pugh tested several different kinds of boot for possible use in the expedition. The ideal boot needed to be both warm and lightweight, and should not interfere with the wearer’s balance on rock and ice. It also describes the rest of the clothing selected for the expedition.

Open Access is rife with disharmony though. Every funder and every publisher has their own take on what are appropriate rules. This makes life interesting but confusing, and sometimes plain difficult.

I was pleased to see therefore that one source of inconsistency stands a chance of being removed.

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has an open access mandate, requiring all NIH-funded research to be deposited into PubMedCentral. They allow a maximum embargo period of 12 months. In other words, the articles can remain invisible in PubMedCentral until 12 months after initial publication.

MRC and Wellcome Trust have a similar policy, but they allow a maximum embargo period of 6 months. (I was told once that when the NIH and Wellcome policies were in discussion back in 2004/5, both were considering a 6-month embargo. NIH subsequently changed to 12 months, but Wellcome went ahead with 6 months, and MRC followed Wellcome’s lead).

This embargo difference has caused some problems. Publishers have swallowed hard and accepted a 12-month embargo period. For example, Elsevier allows NIH-funded papers (author manuscripts) to be deposited into PubMedCentral with a 12-month embargo. But many publishers will not accept a 6-month embargo period. Elsevier does not allow deposition of author manuscripts with a 6-month embargo, so Wellcome and MRC-funded authors must choose the paid open access option.

This difference makes it harder to negotiate with publishers, and also makes compliance harder. If you have MRC or Wellcome funding and you collaborate with an NIH-funded researcher, they will not see the need to go for the paid-OA option and so you end up having to pay the cost from your own budget. This can cause some feelings of resentment which does not help the cause of open access.

The difference in policies may be about to change, if a new Bill in the USA gets through.

The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) would require federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from funded research no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

It has bi-partisan support in the House and in the Senate, but I have no idea how likely it is to be successful.

Richard Noorden has written about the new Bill in Nature News and SPARC have put up an FAQ about the Bill.

I studied chemistry at Bristol. I had enjoyed the subject at school, seeing how substances combined and why. We talk colloquially about “chemistry” between people, referring to how well two people combine.

The School of Chemistry at Bristol back then had a good reputation for organometallic chemistry. This seemed a fascinating area – it was not quite organic chemistry and not quite inorganic chemistry, but a mixture of both, a middle ground. I seem to be drawn to the land in the middle. Organometallic chemistry seemed closer to inorganic chemistry, at any rate most of the inorganic lecturers were devoted to organometallic research. One of the authors of the inorganic chemistry textbook we used (Cotton and Wilkinson) was Geoffrey Wilkinson, who had received a Nobel prize not long before for his work on organometallic sandwich compounds. I recall learning about nickel carbonyls, and ferrocene.

Ferrocene is an extraordinary substance, a sandwich of two organic ring molecules with an iron atom in the middle of the sandwich. The standard representation of its structure is quite striking. We also heard about various more exotic metals. Our professor of inorganic chemistry was another prominent organometallic chemist, Gordon Stone. I remember him telling us about his favourite metal, ruthenium (Ru), and there was also rhodium (Rh) and rhenium (Re) .. And palladium (Pd). These metals are all useful as catalysts in the petrochemicals industry, so this field was important industrially as well as being fascinating.

I haven’t given it much thought since leaving chemistry behind in favour of librarianship, but I found myself recalling some of this a few months ago as I went on a shopping trip to buy some palladium. Well, I didn’t plan to buy palladium especially, but that’s how it turned out. If I tell you that we were shopping in London’s Hatton Garden then you can probably guess why. We bought two rings, not the molecular kind, but rings to go on fingers. To go on our ring fingers. They are made of palladium and I think they look quite attractive, and are a bit cheaper than gold or platinum. And it seemed appropriate for an ex-chemist.They are catalysing a new combination.

Since then the rings have been secreted away in a cupboard. We got busy with making further plans. We had to register our intention to have a Civil Partnership, book the registrars and a room in the local Civic Centre, book the local pub/Thai restaurant, send out invitations, buy new outfits for the day, order a cake, order some flowers, decide on music, write a short speech, booked a holiday, and a dozen or two other little jobs.

Today, 2 Feb, all the planning is at an end. The rings are coming out into the open and by lunchtime we will be Civil Partners. Official! And I will be walking round with a lump of a really powerful catalyst on my finger.

I feel quite excited about getting something published on OC, on the Guardian website.  Several of my fellow Occams Typewriter bloggers are old hands at it by now, but it has taken me a while to summon up the courage. I am very grateful to Jenny for her editorial advice – she suggested some ways to liven it up a little and give it a stronger beginning and end.

For my debut I have written something about Ludwig Guttmann. I should say at this point – do not read further until you have read the Occam’s Corner piece! What follows here is additional to that, not a repeat of it.

OK, so you’re back here now having read the main piece? Let’s continue.

Guttmann was the man who founded the spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville hospital, and later helped give birth to the Paralympic Games. I became interested in him this year, with all the publicity about the Paralympics, and started reading up about him. Two books were particularly valuable:

• Susan Goodman’s 1986 biography of Guttmann: Spirit of Stoke Mandeville: The Story of Sir Ludwig Guttmann
• John Silver’s 2003 History of the Treatment of Spinal Injuries

John Silver’s book was interesting as he had worked with Guttmann at Stoke Mandeville, so had direct insights into the man. John Silver has published a number of other interesting historical articles in the area too.

Another valuable source was Ludwig Guttmann’s own account of the history of the Stoke Mandeville centre.  Though just ten pages, it has some detail I didn’t find elsewhere. The Royal Society Biographical Memoir for Guttmann was another mine of useful facts. Those Royal Society memoirs are such a great resource!

If you want to read absolutely everything about the man and his work you will need quite a bit of time. A bibliography, compiled by Jeremy Tynedal, Frank Stahnisch and Gregor Wolbring, and called Life and Work of Sir Ludwig Guttmann: A Bibliography, contains 117 items (books and articles). I’m afraid I have not read all, or even most, of those. The bibliography was published in Jan 2012 so will not include anything published this year, which I suspect is quite a lot given the Paralympics connection. I found that once I started putting my blogpost together more and more questions popped into my head and my reading list got longer and longer. I looked at the background to spinal injuries, the background to the various people mentioned along the way, and some of Guttmann’s publications on the subject. I really needed to find a focus.

What first piqued my interest in Guttmann was discovering that he had compiled a review for the MRC, and I set about looking for it.  We have a wonderfully rich collection of reprints covering that period, all lovingly catalogued, and I hoped it might be in there. Confusingly I found some reprints by “L Guttmann” and some by “E Gutmann”, and some by the two of them jointly. In the dim light of our store I didn’t spot the slightly different spelling at first and I thought maybe he used two different first names. It transpired that there was an Ernest Gutmann and a Ludwig Guttmann, and they had both worked in Oxford at about the same time. But they were quite unrelated. Figuring all that out took me a little while.

Anyway, it proved impossible to track down the review, despite my best efforts and help from the MRC archivist and the library of the Royal College of Surgeons. This was really frustrating but John Silver’s book mentions that he worked through a number of archives and he too failed to find this report. The MRC archives indicate that there was certainly an intention to publish it and there is some correspondence during 1943 from Guttmann apologising repeatedly for not having submitted the review for publication. I wonder if there is a copy lurking somewhere in another archive.

Once I started writing the piece for Occam’s Corner I realised that this one missing document didn’t really affect the main story I wanted to tell. And if you have been very naughty and read this far without following the instruction above, then NOW is the time to hop over to Occam’s Corner!

But then things got complicated and I realised I wasn’t a real techie. Sure I could edit raw html using notepad and I could do basic CSS, but I couldn’t write a Perl script to save my life. So I lost my techie badge and moved onto negotiating journal licences, managing staff and budgets, and other simple tasks like that. Part of me still yearns to be one of those ‘can do’ techies though.

Thus I could not resist the invitation to go along to the SoLo Hackday (I still think of the event as Science Online London, or SoLo, but it is properly called SpotOn now). The advance publicity said they didn’t just want coders but a mix of people so I thought I’d give it a whirl. There were about a dozen people at the Hackday. Each of us expounded our ideas for projects that we would like to work on and we divided into three groups. I was paired with Mark Woodbridge, a bioinformatician from Imperial College.

I have felt for some years that current awareness (finding out new stuff that you want to read) is a mess. It should be possible to have a sophisticated service that ‘knows’ your interests and brings things of interest to you, allowing you to save them or bat them away, rather like Twitter does. We talked about this for a bit and realised that we would probably need six months and an enormous development team to produce something worthwhile, so I scaled back my ambitions a little.

People clearly want to find new stuff that is directly relevant to their research interests, but I think it is important for people also to have a view of what is happening out in the suburbs of their subject. Some might say this is a luxury and no-one has time to read outside a narrow core, but I still maintain that breadth is necessary, especially in an Institute founded on an multidisciplinary approach. I want to find ways to produce a regularly updated reading list of potentially interesting papers. A very simple way is to use other people’s judgements. Certain journals – e.g. the Nature-branded titles – have a “News and Views” section in each issue with commentaries by experts on a small selection of papers from that issue. An editor has selected some papers as being of particular interest, and commissioned knowledgeable experts to write about them.

I thought it would be good to aggregate all those news and views type pieces into an RSS feed.

Step forward Research Views. We nearly stumbled at the first hurdle as we needed to give our project a name. “Research Views” is not a perfect name but we didn’t want to waste time agonising over it. Hackdays are all about compromise – getting something done in a short space of time.

In principle we could achieve what we wanted by filtering and merging the journals’ RSS feeds, but they are not all sufficiently rich in detail (i.e. they do not all indicate which articles are in the News and Views section). It might also be possible via PubMed, since they have an article type ‘Comment’ which includes these articles. But there is a delay of a few days to weeks getting into PubMed, and longer still before articles are all fully tagged. Further, the ‘Comment’ article type seems to include other kinds of comments, not just the “here is an interesting article” kind of comment. So we needed to build an app.

Mark recommended using Google Appspot to host the app since he had used it successfully for other projects. It took a little while getting things aligned between his Linux box and appspot but then we were ready.

First off we looked at Nature Publishing Group as I suspected their data would be good quality. I know they have done a lot of work to bring all their primary branded journals up to the same standard. It turned out that their RSS feeds are pretty good and it was relatively straightforward to extract what we needed. Mark used something called XOM to do this. There were some minor inconsistencies, and a couple of the journals caused problems so we excluded them for the time being. Before too long we had a web page with a list of Nature-branded journal titles each with a tick box. Choosing some journals and pressing “Submit” generated an RSS feed of News and Views articles.

Next we looked at the Cell Press journals. The RSS feeds here were very thin, and did not reveal which were commentary articles. However, the journal issue contents pages had a good deal of structure. Using Jsoup, with a good dose of persistence and trying out, Mark was able to fish out the relevant information. We found that the journals were not all quite consistent, and since we were running out of time by that point we only included four journals from this publisher initially.

We had spent not quite four hours on the task and had an app that could splice together commentary articles across two publishers, using different techniques. Later on, Mark added three journals from AAAS, the publishers of Science. I hope we can sort out a few more Cell Press titles, and add commentaries published in the PLOS journals too. Maybe even eLife.

I learnt something from the exercise. Looking at the XML and spotting the structure is something I can learn to do, but building a set of commands to carry out a task is still a mystery to me. It was (mildly!) exciting to work on something and see it actually take shape and even work as intended! I am very grateful to Mark for sharing his skill and for his persistence.

So, ladies and gentlemen, we present – Research Views.

Once you have made your selection of journals and clicked “Submit” the resultant RSS feed will automatically fetch any updates whenever you open the feed. In some web browsers the RSS feed does not display nicely, so you may need to fiddle around to add it to your RSS reader.

We identified all kinds of improvements that might be made. But I am not even sure whether it is remotely useful or not. Maybe it is easier doing it through PubMed. Maybe publishers will enhance their RSS feeds to show commentaries. Maybe people don’t need to know about these commentaries.

One other thought we had is that being the subject of a commentary is in effect a badge of honour for an article. I don’t think this is reflected anywhere in article level metrics.

I went to one the other week organised by one of the big publishers, and it was a bit different. It was explicitly targeted at “government libraries”.  They took a fairly broad definition of that term, as being any publicly-funded organisation that was not in education or healthcare. Thus there were some central Government department libraries, some quangos’ libraries, some police and legal libraries, and some research institute libraries represented. We probably all felt initially that we had little in common with the other attendees, but by the end we’d made connections and all felt that the event had been useful and should be repeated.

Part of the success of the day was its interactive nature, encouraged by an expert facilitator. There were two main breakout sessions, where we split into smaller groups and discussed

1. Our e-content strategy
2. What we wanted in a business model for e-content

These certainly got us talking, and I hope gave the publisher some insight into what our world is like. Most of the librarians agreed that we didn’t have one, at least not one formally expressed. I found it difficult to understand even the questions that we were set about e-content strategy – they just did not relate to the environment that I work in. It was encouraging to hear that most of the others in the room had a similar experience. As for business models, it was probably unwise to ask us!  We agreed that we wanted as much as possible, as flexibly as possible, for as low a price as possible.

There were a couple of presentations.  One was an attempt at an overview of e-content strategy.  It was marred by too much emphasis on one particular rather large, unrepresentative and (dare I say?) arrogant library.  The speaker did make some good points:

• Moving from print to electronic resources will entail losing some control over your collection
• Publishers’ packages are not always helpful as they include unwanted material along with useful material
• User surveys and feedback can be valuable but don’t represent the full picture
• Benchmarking against other libraries and broad surveys of the market are of limited value if they don’t reflect local circumstances
• The knowledge and experience of the librarian are crucial

The last three points in particular I found encouraging, reminding me that there is a place for professional judgement, to say “It is important that we do XYZ”.

The other presentation was about the publisher’s approach to Open Access. I had thought I was well-informed about OA developments, but I learned a few things I hadn’t known before, e.g. they publish a mega-journal that I had never heard of.

I thought it was interesting that Open Access was brought up in the context of e-content strategy. I can see that right now there is a strong link between journal subscriptions and open access, and libraries are managing both.  But if we move forward several years I would expect that link to be weakened.  I think Open Access will be seen as part of an organisation’s research strategy rather than part of its content strategy.

I would have liked it if we had spent more time discussing ebooks. Some other delegates said they saw books and journals all as one continuum of e-content, but I still think of them as rather different kinds of beasts, hunted and devoured differently. I am much less clear about the way forward for books than I am for journals.

So, a good time was had by all (and not just because the event was followed by cocktails in the hotel bar!).  I think it could have been more interesting still if there had been two or three other major publishers there.  Perhaps we should suggest that UKSG organise an event for the “Government libraries” sector, or organise our own event and invite several publishers along.