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Brain Strain

Posted on 6 June 2022 by Henry Gee

I am a career depressive.

I’ve been on all the drugs.

Back in the day I was on mianserin which they probably only use nowadays to tranquilize rhinos, and even then, only from a long way off.

After I came off that I was clean for years — snorting a bit of St John’s wort, purely recreationally you understand — although that does tend to turn one into a vampire.

But then I slowly slid off the wagon into the arms of  citalopram. I splarfed this for many years until it wore out, as these things tend to do. After that came a rocky patch in which I discovered that diazepam turned me into a zombie; mirtazapine a monster; and sertraline did nothing for me whatsoever. It was then that my Private Brain-Care Specialist prescribed venlafaxine, which for at least a decade has kept me from curling up into a fetal position and crying.

But now that, too, has begun to wear off. My Private Brain-Care Specialist (a new one, the previous one having retired) has prescribed vortioxetine. The same Private Brain Care Specialist also sent me some questionnaires which show without fear of contradiction that I am definitely up to my spleen on the Autism Spectrum notwithstanding inasmuch as which definite signs of ADHD, a revelation to which Offspring No. 1’s weltschmerzy response was ‘This Surprises Nobody’. It could explain why I feel as unable to relax as a frog on a griddle; have to be completely unplugged from life in order to avoid going completely Harpic; and my idea of a perfect hell/holiday is probably two weeks in a sensory deprivation chamber. Though Leicestershire is nice.

But I digress. Back to the drugs. I have yet to take any vortioxetine (do at least try to keep up at the back), because — and if you’ve been there, you’ll know this — you can’t simply stop taking one kind of happy juice one day and pop a different one the next. One has to slowly wean oneself off the old stuff, and, only when it’s out of one’s system, gradually up the dose of the new.

This process might take several weeks. As of now I have started a week in which I am taking … wait for it ….

… precisely nothing.

No safety net.

Between the tightrope and the shark-infested lagoon nothing but empty air. Next week I start to take doses of vortioxetine so tiny they wouldn’t trouble a goldfish, and then up the dose in weekly increments until I shall be capable of holding a conversation without zoning out.

Screenshot 2022-06-06 at 12.04.37Happily, this slow process hasn’t reduced me to curling up into a fetal position and crying. It has, however, had its effects. Most of the time I feel slightly stoned, rather like Dylan from a Televisual Emission of YesterYore called the Magic Roundabout. Those of a Certain Age will remember Dylan as a hippy rabbit (reputedly named after Bob Dylan) who wandered around in a perpetual funk saying things such as ‘Like. Wow. Man’.

When not feeling stoned I do have the sense of Matches Not Striking On Box. Occasionally I start to cry for no reason. And I am always tired. But that could just be my age.

There is a plus side, though. I am taking advantage of my somewhat trippy state to read a book I’d probably have no patience with otherwise. And it’s doing wonders for my musical creativity. I’m now deep into the Difficult Second Album of my current musical project, G&T (more about that here). I can now understand why musicians and drugs go together like, well, musicians and rugs. I meant drugs. Not rugs. Especially as they get older because, you know, when you are over 60, which I am, you get free drugs. The rugs though are extra. Butterflies. Possibly. And wheels.

Posted in Bob Dylan, citalopram, depression, do you break a butterfly on a wheel, Domesticrox, Dreaming, excuse me madam does this bus go to the station, james joyce, mianserin, mirtazapine, Music, sertraline, Silliness, St John's Wort, the Magic Roundabout, ulysses, venlafaxine, vortioxetine, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on Brain Strain

What I Read In May

Posted on 29 May 2022 by Henry Gee

Emma Healey: Elizabeth Is Missing I actually read this (and Little Egypt, below) in April, but squeezed it in at the very end during a weekend in which I had to see a man about a dog (no, really) so they’ve been extruded into May. I don’t know why I am telling you this. After all, why would you care? But I Digress. There are many stories with a first-person protagonist in which it is quite clear that the narrator isn’t really aware of what is really going on. (My favourite is The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro). Elizabeth Is Missing takes this a step further. Not only does the protagonist not really know what is going on, but her confusion gets worse, as she is suffering from dementia which starts off moderate and gets worse and worse towards the book’s end. Maud (that’s the protagonist) is a widow in a small seaside town where she has lived all her life. She is obsessed by the apparent disappearance of her friend Elizabeth – but her distress really covers a deeper, older mystery, that of the disappearance of her elder sister Sukey when Maud was a girl, just after the end of the Second World War. Unlike the vague, dreamlike present day, Maud recalls the events of the late nineteen-forties with crystal clarity, even though she’s not always aware what’s going on then, either, as she’s a child from whom the grown-ups are variously trying to hide their own grown-up matters.

Lesley Glaister: Little Egypt Many years ago when the world was young I enjoyed bidding in a charity silent auction in aid of our local high school. Among the lots were a keg of beer (which attracted many bids); and a bundle of books from Salt Publishing, Cromer’s very own literary publishing house (which attracted just one bid – mine). I read one of the books, The Lighthouse by Alison Moore, but it was so depressing that the thought of any mo(o)re in that vein put me off for years. Little Egypt, though, was a tonic. I was attracted because it is based around one of my favourite settings — a large country pile in an advanced state of decay, with secrets piled on secrets. Indeed, the house is the title character. Little Egypt is a grand house in the north of England. Like many grand houses, the First World War pretty much did for it, and the spendthrift owners progressively sold off more of the land until it is a  small island completely cut off from the rest of the world by a railway line, a dual carriageway and a superstore. Although dilapidated, it is still inhabited by nonagenarian twins Isis and Osiris, whose childhoods had been scarred by their abandonment in the house, during the 1920s, by their Egyptologist parents who were forever in Egypt squandering their wealth on a search for the fabled Tomb of Herihor. As the story opens, Osiris has long ago descended from eccentricity into madness, but Isis is still as sharp as a tack. For years she has been courted by a developer who wants to buy Little Egypt so it can be levelled to make way for yet another superstore. Isis is sorely tempted … until she remembers the awful secrets that the house conceals. In many ways the book is like Elizabeth is Missing in that it alternates between the girlhood and old age of the central character. The only flaw for me was a section in the middle in which the young twins actually travel to Egypt to see their awful parents. This seemed to go on longer than necessary. Mainly, I think, because those scenes didn’t feature the slowly decaying mansion, against which the tombs and temples of ancient Egypt seemed fresh and new.

Robert Harris: Conclave Were you to pick up and read the kind of thriller customarily sold at airports, and then say to yourself ‘that’s easy, any fool can write a book like that’ — think again. It isn’t. The careful charting of plot; the creation of characters that are believable enough for you to care about them (but no more); the display of vast amounts of research in such a way as it enhances the story rather than detracts from it; all require consummate craft and skill as a writer. Few have more craft or skill than Robert Harris. Probably best known for Fatherland (an alternative history set in the 1960s after Hitler won the war), I first discovered Harris with Pompeii, an adventure set just before the eruption of Vesuvius in 79CE. Although Harris tends to write a lot about the Romans and the Second World War, he has branched out into black humour (Ghost, in which a writer is tasked with ghosting the memoirs of a Prime Minister who looks a lot like Tony Blair); SF (The Fear Index, in which a computer on the stock market goes rogue) , and much else (my favourite is An Officer and a Spy, about the Dreyfus Affair). Clearly, Harris likes to set himself a challenge. To make a thriller out of the election of a new Pope would seem a tall order, given that almost all the characters are elderly men in frocks. Despite an almost total lack of sex or violence, and no car chases (but oh! the costumes!) Harris weaves a truly unputdownable tale about the election of a (fictional) Pope. The incumbent Pope has died after a long illness during which he has left several loose ends and made several seemingly unusual decisions. It falls to Cardinal Jacopo Lomeli, the Dean of the College of Cardinals, to organise the conclave of 118 of his fractious fellows in which a successor will be elected. Cue a great deal of intrigue, politicking, quotations from the Bible and some jaw-dropping plot twists. It might seem odd to write a novel about the Catholic Church these days that is in any way sympathetic. This one is — sympathetic, that is — because despite nods to the ongoing scandals involving sex abuse by the clergy, and the financial chicanery with which the Pontifical bank accounts have been associated, the protagonist is a fundamentally good man. Lomeli has spent a life in the Church, and despite his own repeated bouts of Imposter Syndrome he is clearly devout, well-liked, tactful and skilled in untangling the various problems that the task of running the conclave throws up. And if after reading this book you don’t know everything there is to know about running a Papal conclave, you’ve been reading a completely different book.

Charles Dickens: Martin Chuzzlewit Some wag said of Wagner’s music that it has wonderful moments and dreadful quarters-of-an-hour. One can say much the same of this lesser-known Dickens novel (serialised between 1843 and 1844). Although Dickens felt at the time that it was ‘immeasurably the best of my stories’, reception fell rather flat. Not that it is without its charms. To be sure, it’s no Pickwick Papers or Oliver Twist, but it would be an insensitive reader who didn’t find much to enjoy in this this humungous chungus of a doorstop (my edition runs to more than 900 pages), rather in the way that there are bound to be quite a few plums in a  plum pudding, if it is big enough. The baggy plot is subservient to the moralising character. It is a study in hypocrisy and selfishness from the personal and parochial of Mr Pecksniff to the corporate and criminal of the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Life Assurance and Loan Company. Confusingly, there are not one but two Martin Chuzzlewits – the elder, eccentric and miserly; and the younger, his conceited and snobbish grandson. But wait, there’s more. Chuzzlewits abound, including (but not limited to) Anthony (the Elder Martin’s brother); Mr Pecksniff himself (a distant Chuzzlewit cousin); and his daughters Charity and Mercy (flinty and flighty respectively) but especially the horrible Jonas. In fact, the book is fair stuffed with Chuzzlewits, and there are times when there is so much Chuzzlewittery one can hardly move: the book really should have been called ‘The Chuzzlewit Saga’. To this concatenation of Chuzzlewits may be added a cavalcade of characters, from the virtuous Tom Pinch to the jolly Mark Tapley (who stands to young Martin as Sam Weller does to Mr Pickwick), although it’s Dickens’ female characters that really stand out. Apart from the Chuzzlewit daughters, there’s the put-upon boarding-house proprietor Mrs Todgers; the American literary celebrity Mrs Hominy; the warm-hearted publican Mrs Lupin — and especially the dipsomaniac nurse Mrs Gamp, who drops in every so often to give us a soliloquy on her imaginary friend Mrs Harris, just when the story is about to flag. In fact, I’d say Mrs Gamp transcends the novel to stand as one of Dickens’ finest comic creations. Sadly, the other female principals — Tom Pinch’s sister Ruth and the elder Martin’s confidante Ruth Graham — have traded character for near-saccharine virtue. Halfway through the novel, the young Martin and Mark Tapley sail to America to seek their fortunes, an episode that ends in disaster. Dickens had not long returned from his first visit to America. He went full of hope for the young Republic, but came home thoroughly disenchanted. The American episode in Martin Chuzzlewit is an excoriating satire on the towering self-regard of a people devoted to money at all or any cost, and who have nothing whatsoever to recommend them. Indeed, every dreadful habit, from spitting chewed tobacco to the owning of slaves to the bearing of weapons, is regarded as an Institution; the people who spit and shoot and own slaves among the ‘finest Men in the Country’. Such intellectual pursuits as there are take the form of political theorising that goes so far beyond the capacity of their own authors as to be completely unintelligible. The new nation is so deep-dyed in hypocrisy that people there seem to take an unusual interest in the aristocracy of a country – Britain – they affect to despise. It is in the American episode that Dickens’ sarcasm bites hardest. Here, a character encountered on a steamboat:

His complexion, naturally muddy, was rendered muddier still by too strict an economy of soap and water; and the same observation will apply to the washable part of his attire, which he might have changed with comfort to himself and gratification to his friends … He was not singular, to be sure, in these respects, for every gentleman on board appeared to have had a difference with his laundress, and to have left off washing himself in early youth.

The character is not some vagrant or backwoodsman, but a member of Congress, and (of course) ‘one of the finest men in the country’.

Dickens’ observations of America were so cutting that he was obliged to insert a postscript apologising for it. However, many of his observations seem (the part about personal hygiene excepted) to be as apposite today as they were when Dickens made them almost 180 years ago.

Posted in an officer and a spy, Charles Dickens, conclave, dreyfus affair, elizabeth is missing, emma healey, fatherland, ghost, kazuo ishiguro, lesley glaister, little egypt, martin chuzzlewit, pompeii, robert harris, Salt Publishing, the fear index, the remains of the day, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on What I Read In May

A Diversion into History of Science

Posted on 29 May 2022 by Athene Donald

As a physicist, I may enjoy reading popular history books, but I don’t expect to get involved with history. Coming to Churchill College has given me a wonderful opportunity to learn more about the Archives here and how they are preserved. I enjoy meeting those scholars who come to spend time here. Scholars such as Graham Farmelo, who used the Archives extensively when researching his book Churchill’s Bomb, as well as more formal academics, whose research may not be seen by the general reader.  However, the College’s Archives, set up to house the papers of Sir Winston himself, are a treasury of twentieth century papers and, to a lesser extent, objects. The most recent of these acquired is the late Tony Hewish’s Nobel medal, but they also include more mundane items, such as a Maggie Thatcher handbag to go with her archives.  (As the photo shows, I wasn’t allowed to touch the bag, which is kept carefully sealed.)

P1030821
However, having been born in the middle of the twentieth century, much of the collections held at Churchill don’t really feel like history. After all, I remember Maggie Thatcher’s premiership well; I could even tell you where I was when I heard she’d resigned – announced over the tannoy system in Boots in Cambridge. So getting close to history, to me, means going further past. In the past, when previously a member of the Royal Society’s Council, I had an opportunity to get my hands, literally, on Robert Hooke’s magnificent book, Micrographia, as shown, but no chance to examine it in any detail. As a microscopist by training, I’d have loved to look closely at his drawings, which (reproductions show) are mind-blowingly detailed and beautiful. I’m sure I’d never have made the grade as a microscopist if I’d had to draw everything, as opposed to being able to photograph it, be it via the light or electron microscope.

RSA_ 33

However, last week I had a fantastic opportunity to get my hands on some roughly contemporary books, and really to look at one in particular in detail. This opportunity arose to allow me to follow up on the information I’d been sent, during the pandemic and via photographs only, about Mary Astell, about which I wrote previously. Mary Astell (1666-1731) was a natural philosopher, mainly known as an early feminist, who wrote a book advocating a college for women (A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest, published anonymously in 1694). She believed that women should be encouraged to look beyond mother and nun as ‘career’ alternatives, but her plans for a college came to nought because it was viewed as potentially papist.

However, it turns out that she had a penchant for the study of science. She was brought to my attention by Catherine Sutherland, deputy librarian at Magdalene College in Cambridge, who has discovered in the college’s collections, a number of her books. The one I got to examine in detail was Les Principes de la Philosophie de Rene Descartes, a French edition of the original Latin text. Astell has made numerous, and at times extensive, annotations across the text and on the end-notes, where there were additional copies of the plates in the book. Many of the annotations were in pencil, and often hard to read, but these seemed frequently to be aids to her own translation or, at times, her objections to the words Descartes used (she seemed particularly to object to the word subtile to refer to astronomical objects, replacing the word with celeste, probably relating to her own religious beliefs). At other times she was writing out her own thoughts on the text, as a student today might do. Sometimes these were written in pencil and then clearly over-written subsequently in ink, presumably once she’d got confidence in her arguments. In other places it seemed she’d gone straight in with her quill. Her writing was small and, even with a magnifying glass to suit my elderly eyes, I had trouble always deciphering what she’d written.

Since my ability to read Descartes in French, published with the ‘long s’ (i.e the one that looks like an f without the crossbar, used in English printing as well at the time) is distinctly limited, and it is not a book I have ever studied even in English, it was hard for me always to follow her arguments and check she had mastered what Descartes was saying. But it was absolutely clear how much effort she had devoted to getting to grips with the books. The notes at the end were extensive and thoughtful and, at times, she indicated that she felt there were errors in what was said.

Spending an hour looking through the book was a treat, even if also frustrating. Frustrating, because it clearly needs someone much more familiar with the history of science, the science as it was understood at that time, to examine the annotations and to put them in context. How much could she have learned from the circle in London in which she moved as a distressed gentlewoman (she seems to have relied largely on financial support from richer women who she had got to know)? It is known she spent some time working as an assistant with John Flamsteed at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, but it isn’t obvious whether the annotations in this book pre- or post- date that period. Did she know any, or indeed many, other natural philosophers who would have engaged in their discussions largely at the Royal Society, a place she could not enter? It strikes me the books held at Magdalene and recently discovered would potentially provide the basis of a fascinating PhD in some interesting interdisciplinary way. Maybe someone will follow up on this.

I am deeply grateful to Catherin Sutherland to have enabled me to have this morning of exploration, opening my eyes to topics so far from those I usually tangle with.

 

Posted in Archives, Maggie Thatcher, Mary Astell, Rene Descartes, Women in science | Comments Off on A Diversion into History of Science

Getting Involved with Policy-making

Posted on 22 May 2022 by Athene Donald

Last week I presented evidence to the Commons’ Science and Technology’s Select Committee enquiry into Diversity and Inclusion in STEM. I don’t want to rehearse my arguments, which can be read in the transcript of the full morning’s session (or even watched), but to talk about other aspects of engaging with such enquiries. Suffice it to say that my impression was that this session was called to explore further the suggestion made in the committee’s previous session, that girls ‘just don’t like hard maths’ and so are put off doing Physics A Level. I think it would be true to say that none of the eight witnesses who spoke this week, including those coming from OFSTED and the Institute of Physics via a trio of school leads, had much to say in favour of that position.  It won’t surprise anyone that I likewise felt the problems in attracting girls into Physics lie quite elsewhere,

However, what I want to discuss here is the way a scientist might interact in general with policy-makers. The pandemic has, once again, shone light on the comparative lack of scientific expertise amongst MPs. Few of them have science degrees and it shows. Compare Angela Merkel’s explanations of the spread of a virus with remarks made by our Parliamentary leaders. One felt, as a former chemist, she knew what an exponential increase meant, for instance. It is, of course, not just the MPs themselves, but also those around them, be they SPADs or civil servants, who typically have not studied science to any high level. When I go to talk to student societies (at schools or in the university sector) I try to point out that there are fascinating careers in policy; studying science does not mean one necessarily has to become a scientist, but I do hope it means that the skills a science degree confers will be useful wherever a student ends up.

Looking later in a career, research scientists too have potentially so much to offer. To help researchers work out the routes by which they might do this, we (the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP), the Bennett Institute of Public Policy through Diane Coyle and Churchill College) produced some online resources, outlining the different ways in which a scientist can bring their research to bear on political thinking. It’s not a topic that gets much air-time in formal structures, within my university at least. One might say surprisingly, given that this is certainly one of the ways to construct a REF impact case! For many of these academics, their research may have direct implications for policy decisions, as the pandemic has absolutely made clear. This has been a time when many scientists have found their voices through the media, as well as more formal structures. One of these – Professor Devi Sridhar, Professor of Global Health at the University of Edinburgh – will be my guest later this week for one of my public conversations here at Churchill College (there’s still time to sign up to attend, in person or online). She is someone who has had direct contact with the heart of the Scottish Government, talking regularly with Nicola Sturgeon, as she makes plain in her recent book, Preventable.

Formally, talking about girls and women and Physics is not part of my research career as a soft matter physicist, but I have spent a long time studying the issues, even if most of the ‘publishing’ has been on this blog or in other un-peer reviewed places. One could say this is a form of interdisciplinarity, since my experience as a research physicist is obviously relevant to my knowledge about the subject, but I am in no need of such a label since I’m not trying to obtain funding for the work. Nevertheless, trained as a physicist, I am capable of reading the literature and reading graphs, doing a little critical thinking and analysis and piecing ideas together.

In my reading, I was particularly struck by the graphs shown, from a paper in Science from a few years ago, that showed it wasn’t just Physics that had a hard time when it came to attracting young women into the subject, and the problem seems to be that people (parents, teachers, the media, students themselves?) associate brilliance with those subjects that are heavily male-dominated.

brilliance

Plots of percentage of women taking PhDs in US universities in different disciplines versus a measure of brilliance, taken from Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines, by Sarah-Jane Leslie, Andrei Cimprian, Meredith Meyer and Edward Freeland.

Of course, many in the world believe that brilliance belongs to men. These graphs have overlapping authors with the group that highlighted that children as young as six or seven have already fallen into the trap of believing that about who ‘owns’ brilliance. Thus, before one introduces misogyny and hostility into the equation, there are cultural issues to overcome for young women wanting to pursue such subjects. Diane Coyle, who I mentioned above, has written at various times about the problems with the male-dominated world of Economics. In 2017 she highlighted misogyny in the discipline in the FT; in her recent book Cogs and Monsters, she discusses the dangers a lack of diversity – extending far beyond simply gender ­– has for decision-making in the sphere.

The Parliamentarians are right to worry about these issues. As Caroline Criado Perez has spelled out in her book Invisible Women and as the Gendered Innovations website makes clear, many bad policy decisions can be directly attributed to forgetting that essentially half the world’s population are women. In Physics, as in Economics and many other disciplines besides, the imbalance is damaging to individuals and to society.

So, I was pleased to be invited to present to the Select Committee regarding diversity in STEM, my first experience of such an undertaking. Having said that, it was a nerve-racking experience. As for any sort of interview, preparation is essential but, however carefully one mentally rehearses arguments in the small hours, the line of questioning may head off in a direction far from what was expected and throw one off balance. This time, that only happened a little. I took advice in advance from those who had participated in a range of Select Committee sessions, including for this particular inquiry, and appreciated other people’s willingness to be open. I was also struck by one of these colleagues who asked, after the event, how long it took me to ‘come down’ after the session. The rest of the day, I said, (my session was at 0930 in the morning), expecting to be derided for this feebleness. Oh yes, I was told, that was their experience too. It is good to remember that all of us can suffer from nerves and tension around a new experience, particularly when it feels – whether it is or isn’t in reality – very important. As I’ve said before about other experiences, however, nothing is ever wasted.

 

Posted in Brilliance, Diane Coyle, policy-making, Science and Technology Select Committee, Science Culture, Women in science | Comments Off on Getting Involved with Policy-making

Hocus Pocus

Posted on 18 May 2022 by Henry Gee

Greetings, Pop Pickers. Music fans of a certain vintage will recall with a wry smile the tune Hocus Pocus by the Dutch prog rock band Focus, in which the inspired lunacy of organist, vocalist and flautist Thijs van Leer met the guitar virtuosity of Jan Akkerman. Always willing to try something new, and having no shame whatsoever,  my current musical project G&T has done a cover version. It’ll be released for download on Apple Music, iTunes and so on and so forth on 27 May, but those of a less patient nature can pre-save it on Spotify and Apple Music now. Adrian Thomas played guitar, more guitar, extra guitar, additional guitar, further guitar, with a side-order of guitar and a guitar jus. I did other stuff, and mixed it here at Flabbey Road. If you are impatient to hear more from G&T (and why not?) our album Ice & A Slice is widely available. And we’re currently recording some new material for release sometime in the future. Watch, as they say, this space. Not ‘arf!

Posted in Focus, G&T, Hocus Pocus, Jan Akkerman, Music, rock, Silliness, Thijs van Leer | Comments Off on Hocus Pocus

Brilliance and Diversity

Posted on 15 May 2022 by Athene Donald

A couple of weeks ago I attended the annual conference of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, and a fascinating day it was. Everyone in the hall seemed delighted to be back to meeting in person, but there were several hundred more apparently signed up online (I’ve no idea how many people actually turned up, since my experience over the past two years has been in general only about half the sign-ups actually turn up on the day). Fascinating though the day was, that isn’t really what I want to write about in any detail.

The format of the day was a series of panels of three, with a chair. The panels’ compositions were rich and varied so that the dialogue was stimulating and thought provoking, the drawback of this being there was little time for the questions from the audience to be addressed. I want to focus on the panel that was dealing with growth, the specific question being ‘What does ‘progress’ mean in today’s context and how can it be measured?’.  And my question to you, dear reader, is should one worry that the three panellists were all women? Just shortly before this panel started I’d been talking to another member of the audience who had been complaining about ‘manels’, panels only comprising men, at other conferences. To see three women – admittedly with a male chair – still feels unusual. Because it is rare it feels as if it ought to be a positive, but is it? I haven’t decided where I stand on this. On principle I feel we should aim for balance of some sort (and it is worth stressing, there were no male-only panels), but with four panels of three plus a chair for each, what is balance? Diversity of opinion is likely to lead to the best-rounded decisions.

What brought this fact into even sharper focus, was one of the questions. The women had set out their positions about how growth should be defined in ways that aren’t simply about GDP and standard metrics, with much emphasis on inclusion and making sure all voices are heard, be it Cumbrian sheep farmers (as described by Bryan Wynne in his book The Public Value of Science) or Indian women who lack land ownership but have a clear stake in how land is used. The question from the floor was, would the discussion and answers given have been different if three men had been on the panel? It was hard not to feel the answer would undoubtedly have been yes, things would have been different, the emphasis less about inclusion and perhaps more about expertise and economic measures. It was refreshing to have a very different viewpoint.

When have we reached the point when we don’t have to worry about gender composition? For a panel of 3, there are only 4 possible combinations of men and women, although this figure is doubled by considering which the chair is (and can be further nuanced by the involvement of those who don’t identify as either male or female). Of the other three panels that day, there were two that consisted of two women and one man plus a female chair, and one that consisted of two women and one man plus a male chair. Is that balance? It is after all a preponderance of female panellists, although perhaps offset by the fact that the keynote speaker was Patrick Vallance and his session of Q+A was chaired by the University’s VC, Stephen Toope.

The panels comprised people from many different disciplines representing a different sort of diversity, ranging from Engineering (Baroness Brown, aka Julia King) to Philosophy of Science (Anna Alexandrova), via the more obvious disciplines, including the Bennett Professor of Public Policy and co-director of the Bennett Institute Diane Coyle, who is an economist. It is interesting to note that Engineering (plus my own discipline of Physics), Philosophy and Economics are three of the most male-dominated academic disciplines there are, yet all three panellists I name are rather obviously not male. A refreshing change.

A 2015 study on the relationship between perceptions of the need for ‘brilliance’ to succeed in different disciplines and the percentage of women populating these fields showed a very strong inverse correlation. If brilliance was believed to be necessary, then the data showed that there were low percentages of women studying for PhDs in the subject.  In other words, Physics/Engineering, Philosophy and Economics are exactly the disciplines which have brilliance associated them in most people’s minds and relatively few women engaged in them. Two of the authors of this study went on to carry out a further study, this time on young children. In this case, substituting the word brilliance for ‘really, really smart’, it was shown that children as young as six thought, on average, boys were smarter than girls (something that was not true at the age of five). Offered a choice of games to play, by 6 or 7 girls tended to shy away from games they were told were for the smart.

Do you see a connection? The messages that young children receive are very influential in the choices they make later in life. If schools don’t counter stereotyping actively then what is there to push pack on these cultural messages? Headteachers (see my last post) need to be very conscious of this, not blithely assume children always make their choices free from external pressures, even if subliminal ones. I am glad to say I have been asked to present evidence to the Science and Technology Select Committee Inquiry on Diversity and Inclusion in STEM, so I hope to be able to tease out some of these important messages to counter the crude idea that girls simply don’t like hard maths or physics, and that that is natural.

Posted in conferences, Diane Coyle, education, Equality, manels, Stereotypes | Comments Off on Brilliance and Diversity

Parliamentary Activity

Posted on 2 May 2022 by Athene Donald

This week has brought some curious interventions into the STEM landscape in Parliament. I will return shortly to the much-publicised, if seemingly ill-informed remarks about girls and Physics made by Katherine Birbalsingh – a headteacher and the Government’s social mobility commissioner – but let me start with a different story, also close to my heart. Ottoline Leyser was talking to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee session on delivering a UK science and technology strategy in her capacity as CEO of UKRI (relevant section about 35 minutes into the evidence). She openly admitted that UKRI was (still) not really coping well with interdisciplinary work. As she put it

‘where I think we have not yet delivered is what I would call research that is so interdisciplinary that it has no home’.

Interdisciplinarity is something that the 2014 Nurse Review highlighted as a challenge that a new over-arching body (that body which subsequently came into being as UKRI) ought to be well-placed to resolve. In the so-called Strategic Prospectus of UKRI in 2018 (no longer apparently available on UKRI’s website, although I have a downloaded copy), the emphasis in this area was on the Strategic Priorities Fund (SPF), which has indeed put money towards a range of interdisciplinary initiatives, including my own research area of the Physics of Life. However, these are all specific, targeted calls under eight identified themes. This fund is not the place to go for blue skies interdisciplinary research in general. In the 2018 prospectus it was said that the Fund would

‘drive an increase in high-quality multi- and interdisciplinary research and innovation by encouraging and funding work in areas which previously may have struggled to find a home. It will ensure that good ideas are supported that might once have been more challenged by organisational boundaries. It will give pioneering research the space to develop, laying the foundations for future capability.’

That the SPF calls are instead highly targeted means this aspiration is not met. Instead, numerous applications will continue to fall down the cracks, as they have for many years and as I described a decade ago in the relatively early years of this blog. At that time I said ‘We should have a seamless funding landscape and we do not.’ Nor do we now, as Ottoline admitted in her testimony in the Lords.

It is a conversation I started having with funders more than 15 years ago and, despite many warm words directed towards inter- and multi-disciplinary research in many documents, things don’t seem to have moved particularly far forward. In the 2019 UKRI Delivery Plan, there was a promise to ‘Review our peer review mechanisms to best support multidisciplinary research’ , but I have seen no sign of such a review being set up in practice; maybe others have. One of the key problems for such research is the failure of referees to appreciate that originality and excellence do not have to reside in every single part of a proposal. For this reason, IDAP – the Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel for REF2021 which I chaired – stated clearly in its criteria that

‘the criteria [of originality and significance] do not need to be demonstrated across all of the constituent parts brought together in the work, but may be identified in one or more parts, or in their integration.’

Generations of referees often fail to appreciate this simple fact, based on my experience on grant-giving panels (although I hope the REF sub-panels have managed better). A review of peer-review for such grants is extremely overdue. I hope it is in Ottoline’s sights.

As for the second story, the recording and transcript of this can also be found on the web (at about 10.20), but Birbalsingh’s attitude towards girls and physics is so outdated and stereotyped, that when approached by the Guardian for a comment I described it as ‘terrifying’ in an off-the-cuff remark by phone. I’d have been much more guarded in an email, but I was in the coffee break at a conference and trying to battle with the absence of a reliable phone signal to make any contact at all.  Birbalsingh’s comments included:

‘From my own knowledge of these things, physics is not something that girls tend to fancy. They don’t want to do it. They don’t like it….

There is a lot of hard maths in there that I think that they would rather not do. That is not to say that there isn’t hard stuff to do in biology and chemistry—there is— but it is not mathematics’.

You can listen to the whole of her evidence on the recording, or read the transcript, if you think I might be unfairly picking out one small part, but you won’t find anything to counter that position in the rest of what she says. As a result I do find her attitude  ‘terrifying’, because it comes from someone who is meant to be a leader in the field. To hear such words spoken by a supposed expert really is deeply dispiriting, a view many other female scientists also expressed in the hours after her statement (see the full Guardian story here; there are other comments from experts on the Science Media Centre’s website).

Birbalsingh did not make her position any better when in her intended defence she subsequently tweeted that this was ‘my guess’ i.e. not based on evidence. Had she read the IOP’s 2012 report It’s Different for Girls, she might have had some evidence to the contrary to rely on. Interestingly, back when that report was released and I was asked to talk about it on Radio 4, I was faced with a different female headteacher (whose name I don’t recall) who tried out exactly the same line of ‘girls just don’t like physics’, a position I tried to debunk when I wrote about it at the time in the Guardian. I won’t repeat the arguments I made then but, ten years on, those arguments have stood the test of time. It is depressing that some people seem to want to believe that cultural expectations placed on young girls have no impact on their choices, that we are somehow hard-wired differently from birth from those systematising boys so that we are all empathetic and should stay as nurses or whatever.

We will never shift the dial on how many girls enter the Physical Sciences, Computing or Engineering as long as educational leaders (presumably primarily those, such as Birbalsingh, with arts and humanities backgrounds as opposed to first-hand experience of what STEM is all about) believe such inaccurate tropes without studying the evidence to the contrary, of which there is plenty. Much of it is summarised and the background given, for instance, in books by Cordelia Fine (Delusions of Gender and Testosterone Rex) and Gina Rippon (The Gendered Brain).  A school leader who discourages half the population from pursuing Mathematics or Physics is not doing the best they can for their pupils.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Interdisciplinary Science, Katherine Birbalsingh, Ottoline Leyser, Science and Technology Select Committee, Science Culture, Science Funding, UKRI, Women in science | Comments Off on Parliamentary Activity

In Charnwood Forest

Posted on 23 April 2022 by Henry Gee

Squeezed into an improbably small space in the very heart of England between Leicester (pronounced ‘Lester’) and Loughborough (pronounced ‘Chicago’) is a magical region called Charnwood Forest. Given the proximity of the amenities of modern life and two fairly large conurbations, Charnwood Forest is the Land that Time Forgot. In the middle of Charnwood Forest is a small village called Woodhouse Eaves. In the middle of Woodhouse Eaves is a small cottage. And, for the past ten days, in the middle of the small cottage was Yours Truly, sent by Mrs Gee who knows the signs when I am just about to lose all connection with reality and go completely Harpic*.

The worries of COVID; the exigencies of working at the Submerged Log Company; and the seemingly relentless round of publicity surrounding my recent tome A (Very) Short History of Sex and Chocolate – all had taken their toll. Now, these are all nice problems to have, but it seems that I have no ‘off’ switch and occasionally need a retreat — by way of a circuit breaker — where I can be quiet and peaceful, on my own, just me, tout seul, and unaccompanied except for my walking boots and a pile of light reading of the kind that Mrs Gee won’t look at and say pityingly ‘Oh, your Poor Brain’.

You could hardly imagine anywhere more quintessentially English than Charnwood Forest. Grand houses and deer parks;

Deer.In a park.

villages with quaint chocolate-box cottages;

these days the gingerbread alone would cost a fortune

water meadows; glittering streams;

A glittering stream. Recently.

deep forests with the occasional folly straight out of a fairy tale;

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, etc. etc.

romantically craggy outcrops;

A romantic and craggy outcrop

horses, cows, sheep and albino emus.

Yes, you read that right. Albino emus. In Leicestershire. Who knew?

I do love to go for a ramble, though being of a large and expansive frame seven miles is usually my limit notwithstanding inasmuch as which I walk dogs every day while at home. Happily Woodhouse Eaves is very close to some amazing walks. It lies close to not one but two yes two count ’em two trails — the National Forest Way and the Leicestershire Round, each of which takes you through landscape ranging from the bucolic to the breathtaking, yet without one ever needing to scramble down vertical scree or having to rope oneself together while bridging a dangerous crevasse. Of course, one can mix’n’match pieces of these trails and also incorporate the many public footpaths, and all of them have been carefully signposted so you can’t get lost. I did, however, use the Ordnance Survey app on my smartphone, which enhanced the experience.

Being as I am a recovering palaeontologist, Charnwood Forest offered me the opportunity to slip off the wagon. Here’s why — this part of Leicestershire yields among the oldest fossils in the world that can be seen without a microscope. These fossils belong to Ediacaran Biota, strange frondlike creatures of uncertain affinity that wafted in an eldritch manner on the ocean floor around 600 million years ago, and which were wiped out in the Cambrian Explosion some 541 million years ago. With fronds like that, who needs anemone’s? Now, one usually imagines that one has to go an awfully long way to find fossils of such preternatural antiquity. Fossils of this age are known from places as far-flung as the Deserts of Sudan, and the Gardens of Japan of Namibia; the time-worn hills of South Australia; and the frozen wastes of Arctic Russia. But no, you can find them around Charnwood Forest, if you know where to look. For they are not easy to spot. I only found them at all thanks to the guidance of my friend Professor E. M. of Cambridge, who is an expert on the Ediacaran Biota.

One of these is an ancient time-worn fossil. The other is the impression of an Ediacaran organism.

The fossils are no more than crinkles in the rock, the life-forms having been buried, Pompeii-like, in layers of volcanic ash that settled on the floor of the tropical ocean where they once thrived, the rock setting hard, and, after jostling around on the Earth’s surface came to rest in a quiet corner of Leicestershire, or all places, such that I might come upon them half a million years later.

*Clean Round The Bend

Posted in albino emus, Charnwood Forest, Ediacaran Biota, Fossil Hunting, travel | Comments Off on In Charnwood Forest

Library day in the life, Spring 2022 (part 2)

Posted on 22 April 2022 by Frank Norman

This post is an account of what I did at work for four days in Mar/Apr 2022. The idea is to give an impression of the range of tasks I engage in during my work as librarian at the Francis Crick Institute. I’ve included some reflections and mini-rants so it’s not just a list of actions.

I’ve done this a few times over the years – the last time was in 2018.  Previously I’ve covered five days in a single week but I have done it differently this time. I’ve stretched it out a bit and ended up covering eight days in total over a period of two months. The previous post covered four days in Feb 2022.

Wed 2 Mar 2022 in the Crick

I’m working in the Crick today and got in early as it’s going to be a busy day.

We had a subscription problem yesterday – an invoice payment problem. It is on the way to being sorted and the supplier had seemed satisfied with my response yesterday.  But today we’ve been cut off from the service; two users got in touch with me first thing asking what’s up.   I shot off some emails – one apologetic to the users and one pleading to the supplier.  A bit later, and to my relief, it’s all resolved.

We’re getting some posters printed for our lunchtime popup event but the person who was supposed to do it was unable to come in to work today dues to transport problems. Fingers crossed his colleague can print them for us. Yes he can!

Recently an aspiring librarian paid a visit, to shadow me for a day and learn about our work.  This was arranged through the excellent NLPN (New Library Professionals Network). The person who visited then wrote up her experience, and today I sent off a short paragraph to go with her write-up on the NLPN website.

I replied to an email from a researcher about a new paper they’ve had accepted.  The publisher changed the CC BY statement that he’d included in the manuscript and he wanted to know if that’s OK.  I know that this publisher does allow OA compliance via the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS), so I’m not too worried if the wording is not exactly that given by Wellcome, so long as the intent is clear. We will be able to deposit the author-accepted manuscript to PubMedCentral with a CC BY licence.

Then I grabbed a coffee.  On the way I saw one of the group leaders who sits on our library committee.  She is a member of the wider editorial board for a journal which causes us a lot of OA problems. She said that she’d raised the issue at the last editorial board meeting but another board member (from a different UK institution that also has core-funding from Wellcome) insisted that it’s not a problem for them.  Hence no action was taken by the publisher. This is really unhelpful. It really is a problem and has been for many years   I dashed off an email to Wellcome  to suggest they remind all their funded researchers about this journal. I emailed our group leader with Wellcome’s response, to let her know I’d taken some action and that I appreciated her efforts to bring about change.

Our popup event in the Atrium to promote Reading Corner went well.  We had a good deal of interest and some good conversations about books, science history, philosophy and EDI. It was a lot of work putting it on so I was very glad we got a good response.

I had some more meetings in the afternoon, then I left slightly early as I was singing some lovely music for Ash Wednesday later.

Wed 16 Mar in the Crick

I got in early today to prepare for the ITO Gathering later on, and for some other meetings taking place.

There was not much relevant for me at the ITO Standup today. I grabbed a coffee then  checked in with ResearchFish to see how the submissions were going.  The number of people still to submit is diminishing so it looks like we’re on target to be finished by tomorrow’s deadline. I chased one person who’s not made a start on their submission yet.

Then I went straight into a meeting about OA we’d arranged for the Crick African Network Fellows.  We explained what the Crick OA policy requires and what the LIS team can do to support the CAN Fellows with OA. They were zooming in from South Africa, Ghana and Uganda. There was a slight technical problem with the sound at our end so I had to talk through all the slides. About half the fellows attended but it was recorded so can be shared with the others. There were a few questions at the end.  It was worth doing – I think we learned as much from the CAN Fellows as they did from us.

At the LIS catch-up (in person) we talked about our next pop-up, about the ResearchFish campaign (the deadline is tomorrow) and about changes to our internal grant codes.

I had a 1:1 session with one team member. We talked through the next steps with journal subscriptions. We are still waiting for two deals for 2022 to be arranged. I hope that we can get at least one of them sorted before the end of this financial year, but I suspect we won’t.

Then I sat in on a meeting with ITO colleagues about a Cybersecurity issue.  I didn’t have a lot to contribute, just some minor typo corrections to the draft plan. Sometimes I surprise myself with some good suggestions, but this topic was a bit too far from my area of operation.

After lunch I made some last-minute changes to the slides for the ITO Gathering (a monthly informal meeting for all ITO staff) then launched into the meeting itself, all on Zoom. We were a bit short of content for this meeting, but it turned out fine with some really interesting talks and demos of new projects completed.

Then I had another internal meeting. The Tech Request Group considers new IT system requests.  There were a couple of interesting ones – both quite small in scope but it’s always instructive to see how my IT colleagues approach this kind of problem-solving.

Next was a face-to-face meeting with two people from our Biological Research Facility. They are starting to promote the ARRIVE guidelines at the Crick and to encourage Crick researchers to follow the guidelines when publishing research. This is in conjunction with the National Centre for the three Rs (NC3Rs). We talked about the challenges of persuading researchers to follow new sets of rules, and I mentioned some of the other initiatives under way (training programs, research integrity) as well as our own OA work.  I agreed that we would add a question about ARRIVE to our manuscript notification form, to help promote awareness.

Then I spent a bit of time updating my job description. I tried to flesh it out a bit more –to balance between specifying someone who can lead and inspire a team, but who also knows all about current LIS and scholarly communications issues, including bibliometrics, Research Data Management and archives.

My final meeting of the day was with the Director, Chief Operations Officer and Research Director to discuss some current open access challenges posed by the new UKRI policy.

Thur 17 Mar in the Crick

The ResearchFish submissions are almost complete. My colleague will chase the final few later this morning. We made an effort this year to give more support to those who were making their first ResearchFish submission. This seems to have paid off as there are very few last-minute panics this time.

My manager has revised the draft job description and improved it hugely.   I gave some feedback and we’ve now got a version ready to go. Next stop, HR.

I attended the webinar about the UKRI OA policy, all 2 hours of it.

I arranged to be working in the Crick today in case I had to go knocking on doors to remind group leaders about their ResearchFish submissions, but all of them have been done – before lunch!  (Except one person on leave for whom we’ve arranged an extension).  It’s our best ever – usually we’re chasing up until 4pm, the deadline.

I had a zoom meeting with my counterpart at EMBL in Heidelberg. We do this every now and then to catch-up, share experience and tips.

I drafted a letter to UKRI raising an issue with the new OA policy. I also emailed a couple of major publishers, following up previous correspondence with them about the new UKRI policy.  I’m trying to make sure they are aware of the implications.

I exchanged several emails with one of our suppliers, and one of my ITO colleagues, trying to get SSO integration set up for a product. I think we’re nearly there now, after some stumbles.

Then I spent some time working on new additions to our publications database. The team add new Crick papers to our Symplectic system each week and I have to do a quick double-check and verify them.  We put quite a bit of effort into curating new papers, and adding various metadata elements.  Mostly this is straightforward but some papers are more tricky, and I have to judge whether a paper should be counted as Crick work or not.

Fri 8 Apr 2022, working from home

I dealt with a query from a group leader about her publications.  The list on the external website was different from the list in our Symplectic system, and slightly different from her own list. I figured out why and explained this to her.

One of my annual tasks is to help generate a list of papers to be highlighted in the Crick annual review.  All 120 group leaders are invited to submit one of their papers that they consider to be a major advance and I collate these for someone else to choose from. I worked through the first batches of responses, collating them and acknowledging their emails.  A few group leaders had questions about the process.

Friday is often a good day for pushing longer-term projects forward. We are looking at possibly assigning DOIs to our core-funded grants, and I’m trying to see what other funders are doing about Grant DOIs. Cue some emails.

I sent a few emails about some other OA projects and answered a GL question about OA.

Yesterday I met with a few people from a publisher, interested to hear my thoughts on information seeking and use generally, with a focus on ebooks and protocols. We had a memorable conversation not least because they made no attempt to sell me anything! In my experience that’s rare with publishers. Today I sent some follow-up information linked to some of the things I’d mentioned.

I sent some more email follow-ups – arranging to chat about archives, about a financial database product, trialling a new(ish) AI citation search tool. I also responded to a request to purchase some research management books.

I tweeted and retweeted some interesting things.  I also contributed to a thread about OA in SpringerNature journals, and whether we could publish in compliance with UKRI. I was then a bit surprised to read an email from Jisc on this subject, very late in the day, with follow-ups on twitter. I know some of the backstory to this so it was interesting to see it play out in real time.

Finally I drafted some internal news items about our new OA policy, and about new journal/article search tools that are now available to Crick staff.

Just in case you’re interested, the job advert for my role is now online.

Posted in Libraries and librarians, Library day in the life | Comments Off on Library day in the life, Spring 2022 (part 2)

Library day in the life, Spring 2022 (part 1)

Posted on 22 April 2022 by Frank Norman

This post is an account of what I did at work for four days in Feb 2022. The idea is to give an impression of the range of tasks I engage in during my work as librarian at the Francis Crick Institute. I’ve included some reflections and mini-rants so it’s not just a list of actions.

I’ve done this a few times over the years – the last time was in 2018.  Previously I’ve covered 5 days in a single week but I have done it differently this time. I’ve stretched it out a bit and ended up covering 8 days in total over a period of 2 months. This post has 4 days and the next post gives an account of 4 days in Mar/Apr 2022.

Thurs 10 Feb 2022

Today I’m working from home.  I have a comfortable chair, a good-sized table, a laptop and an extra screen.  It’s not quite as good as the office layout in the Crick building but it’s OK.

I start the day by reviewing emails and answering them or forwarding as necessary. One was a confirmation from a publisher to say they’ve renewed our subscription.  I’m a bit perplexed why this has come in now – I thought it was already renewed in November! But these days nothing surprises me when it comes to journal subscriptions.

I also check in to Slack and review any messages. One message told me about a big new neuroscience project involving two Crick labs. And another mentioned the UKRI consultation about its EDI (Equality, Diversity & Inclusion) strategy. The Crick has had an enterprise licence for Slack for a few years and it came into its own when the lockdown struck. There’s a mixture of general channels and other channels linked to specific work areas.

Next I check that my VPN connection is active and then I check my calendar for the day. It’s going to be a busy one (which is why I’ve chosen to document it here).

I log into our finance system and approve an order.  This is an open access (OA) payment to an Elsevier transformative journal. I wish these article processing charges could be zero-rated for VAT, the same as books, journals and ejournals.

I emailed a publisher representative about one of our Read & Publish deals.  We had a slightly unusual (favourable) arrangement for the deal in 2021 and I’d assumed this would continue for 2022. Yesterday I realised that on renewal in January it has changed to a slightly less favourable setup.  I penned a (slightly begging) email to see if we can go back to the more favourable arrangement for 2022.

Success!  They came back quickly and said yes.

I received an email from my boss about a new collaborative agreement between a Crick research group and a University research group.  They will share data with each other but also want to share an Endnote library. My colleague is our expert in Endnote so I passed it to her to look into, but I raised some copyright considerations too.

Before lockdown we used to put on small, themed book displays and soon we will restart these. Each one has about 16 books, all on a single theme.  We’re creating two new displays – one on Lab lit (the genre of fiction set in real-world scientific labs) and one on pandemics (including flu, COVID and also vaccination). I choose the books, my colleague drafts a booklet with information about each book and then I edit that, adding a paragraph about the theme of the display. Today I worked on editing the Lab lit booklet.

Then I had my first Zoom call of the day – with my IT colleagues. The Library & Information Services team is part of the IT office (ITO).  There is a daily short meeting with all the ITO team leads to review any issues and give project updates. Much of what goes on in these meetings is not directly relevant for me, but it’s instructive anyway and being there means I don’t miss anything crucial. The meetings are often only 10 mins long, but can extend to 30 mins if required.

There was also some discussion about a project to create a digital data retention policy.  IT colleagues have been talking with their counterparts at another institute.  I make a note to contact the archivist at that institute to find out more.

Then I went straight into the LIS Team daily catchup on Zoom. We started these catchups when we were all working from home at the beginning of the lockdown.  Now we’re working in the office on some days, but we have different days in the office so it’s still useful to have a quick catch-up every day.

Today we talked about a journal Read & Publish deal for 2022 that we’re still waiting to hear about. I agreed to chase Jisc. I am nostalgic for the days when the year’s subscriptions were all sorted out well before January! These days it takes until the end of April to sort everything out.  We also talked about which books to include in the pandemics and vaccination book display.

Later I attended a Zoom call to hear a vendor tendering to provide a contract and licence management system. This is for a Crick-wide system, but managing (journal) licenses and contracts is a bit of a headache for us so I’m interested in this project. Today’s was the second vendor to present their system. It’s interesting how varied the systems can be.

I popped out of my flat to get lunch. Usually I stay in but I wanted to get some fresh air today.

Another Zoom call – the monthly ITO all-hands meeting.  This is a monthly short address from our boss to update us on developments in the department, with a Q&A session to follow. This month we learnt about upcoming changes to the ITO dept structure, some updates on Covid arrangements and an update on the results of the Crick’s 5-yearly review exercise.

In the afternoon I had a Zoom call with one of my team members, to talk about digital science tools.  Her post was originally designated as an early career position, so I have built in some learning & development activities. We aim to have 1 or 2 sessions per month to talk about some aspect of library & information services. It hasn’t been as regular as that, especially during lockdown but now we’re almost at the end of the planned series. For today’s session, on digital science tools, I focused on the Bianca Kramer/Jeroen Bosman work, plus something on electronic lab notebooks.

I wonder whether to share my notes from these sessions more widely, though some of what I say quickly goes out of date. Maybe it’s a project for after I’ve retired (this summer).

I’ve also been keeping an eye on discussions on the UKCORR email discussion list.  A post there yesterday interested me so I’ve been checking to see if there are any further responses.  There was another good thread today, about Transformative Journals and UKRI policy.

Coincidentally, I spotted new guidance on the Jisc website, which mentions TJs.   I’d been told some back that this would be coming but it’s good to have it officially. I thought I knew what it was going to say but looking closely at this guidance I can see it is quite confusing and not what I’d expected.

I had an email from a certain video journal publisher telling me that their ‘business model is changing’.  Usually this is code for ‘you’ll have to pay more’. I’ll need to have a careful look at this ahead of our next library committee meeting in April.

An internal news piece I’d written about our ‘Reading Corner’ appeared in the Crick weekly round-up. Reading Corner is a few bookshelves containing our general and historical collection of books. The collection has been in storage for a few years, and the only outings the books had was via the themed book displays I mentioned above.  Now some space has been found for us to show off more of the collection – we have new dedicated shelving to display about 400 books (half the collection). The LIS team are quite excited about this and we hope that the researchers will enjoy the new facility too.

I should perhaps explain that the Crick library service is almost entirely an electronic service with no physical space or physical collection on display before now.

Wed 16 Feb 2022

I’m working in the Crick building today, so I have an extra screen and also real-life colleagues to talk to.

As usual I start by catching up on emails and Slack messages. I’ve realised that our access to a journal archive is broken. This is an example of a problem that we were discussing with Jisc yesterday, so it’s quite timely. I email our Jisc contact to explain what’s happened.

One of our Group Leaders has an interest in novel funding schemes (and has actually got a few things running in quite a big way to trial new approaches to funding research).  I’ve been working to put him in touch with one of my external contacts who is working on different aspects of novel research funding methods.  I’ve made the link between them now, so I hope they have a useful discussion.

I join the daily ITO Zoom call.  There’s a mention of the forthcoming Technicians Week at the Crick, and talk about creating an ITO stall on one of the days, to highlight the work of ITO. We also heard about plans for easing the COVID restrictions at the Crick.

Next was the LIS catch-up – not on Zoom this time. All four of us are in the building today so we had a real face-to-face meeting.  I passed on some info from the ITO meeting just before. We also discussed plans for the Reading Corner popup next month (we will have a table down in the ground-floor atrium during lunchtime, to promote the book collection). We came up with some good ideas for the event.

We also briefly discussed ideas for a future ORCID popup.  This will be part of a longer campaign to promote ORCID and our Crick Research Outputs system.

In the afternoon I joined a Zoom call with someone from Open Life Science (OLS),  plus two Crick colleagues who work on open science projects. We learnt about the work of OLS, particularly the mentoring/training programs they run. These are over 16 weeks, about 2 hours per week. Each mentee must think of a project and they will discuss it with their mentor every 2 weeks.  In the intervening weeks there is a cohort (plenary) call when they hear experts talk on a particular topic. In these calls the participants can also share their experiences with others in the program. It’s an interesting approach to promoting open science knowledge.  We will need to think about who/how to promote OLS at the Crick, both to mentees, mentors, and potential expert speakers.

Just after lunch I host the ITO Gathering on Zoom. This is a monthly informal 60-min meeting for everyone in ITO. We start with a short quiz, then a talk from someone in the Crick but outside ITO, then team news, achievements, possibly a short talk or two on a technical topic, and finally an ‘open mic’ talk where an ITO member of staff talks for 10 mins on any subject they want to choose. It’s a regular spot to celebrate successes and get to know each other better. It’s been Zoom-only for the past 2 years but I hope we can do a real life meeting soon. I arrange the speakers and host the meeting. I’m always exhausted at the end of the meeting!

I had 1:1 meetings with each of my team members today.  We normally do this weekly to talk through issues and identify any problems I can help with.

Fri 18 Feb

I’d planned to write about today’s activities, but I was off sick today.  I felt rough yesterday and am still very tired today.  My lateral flow tests are negative so it’s not COVID.

Tue 22 Feb

I’m in the building again today.  Two of my team members are in too, with another of them attending the R2R conference – in person! It will be great to attend a real-world conference again.

I have quite a lot of catching up (emails etc) to do after my couple of days off sick. I missed a meeting with ResearchFish but my colleague handled it for me. It’s good to have colleagues who can step up when needed.

I followed-up with someone who had asked about copyright for an article he’d written that was now accepted – asking which box to tick.  We need to check up what he’s doing about the OA too.

I also responded to another researcher who had suggested  ‘If there’s no deal with the publisher then we can ignore OA, right?’  I had to disabuse him of that lovely notion.

After my usual morning routine of the ITO and LIS daily Zoom calls I attended another Zoom session for a company tendering for the contracts and licence manager system. It was interesting again.

Then I went to look at a pile of books that one lab wanted to discard. A handful were interesting and we’ll add them to our Reading Corner. The rest we will arrange for collection by Book Rescuers. Between various labs closing we have about 150 books to dispose of now.

I went downstairs to grab a coffee and bumped into our internal comms person. He agreed to send an update/refresh about Reading Corner. We’ve had a few questions from staff and realised our initial notice wasn’t clear enough, so I have revised it.

I gave some help to a colleague who is setting up our new OpenURL resolver.  The information about different journal packages is not always clear – what titles are included, and which version of the package we should choose. It’s more difficult when some packages are actually ‘pick’n’mix’, so the published list of titles in the deal doesn’t match those that we actually subscribe to. I’m looking forward to getting this set up.  it will also feed into Browzine and Libkey – two new tools we are adding.

This afternoon I had a catch-up with the new EDI manager at the Crick, to talk about LIS and EDI. It was useful. Although mostly the LIS just deals with science information, we do go beyond that into related areas that support science. EDI is a key area that I’ve always been keen to support.

I had a request from a contact on LinkedIn to look at an editorial she has written on preprints. I agree to give some feedback.

I received an invitation to join an advisory board – I replied that I would love to but I will retire in 5 months, so best that they find someone else.

An email from a publisher asks if I’d like to hear about some exciting new product they are developing. I’m not really enthusiastic, but say ‘Yes, tell me all about it’.

Thur 24 Feb In the Crick.

I’m feeling all kinds of emotions with the news this morning from Ukraine.

My team member who does most of our open access work is attending the webinar on the new UKRI open access policy. Later she updates us about what was said.

A question about MyAthens+ was passed to me – do we want to upgrade our Athens subscription (i.e. pay more) to include MyAthens+?  I suspect the answer is going to be ‘no’. The extra product seems to be a portal thing and we’re expecting Browzine/Libkey to do this job for us once we’re fully onboarded. My colleague is digging into this a bit more before we respond.

I received an email from someone I know slightly asking if I’d give an online talk about OA and open science to researchers, as one part of a regular series of webinars on research integrity and related topics. I agree to do it.

A few other emails on small matters – fixing one of our scientists to talk at next month’s ITO Gathering; emailing an ITO colleague with a list of developments we hope to see implemented around the way publications are displayed on the Crick website; emailing my edited version of the book display booklet on pandemics etc; agreeing payment terms for a big invoice; forwarding details to colleagues of a long-awaited Read & Publish deal; forwarding details of the disaster recovery plan for a software tool we’re subscribing to.

I also email a scientist who’s trying to sort out OA for his new article, but the journal is one that is rather difficult.

At the end of the day I attend the Crick lecture, which is given by Demis Hassabis from Deepmind.  He is mightily impressive, explaining the power of machine learning in a straightforward and clear way. I think it’s one of the most interesting science talks I’ve been to for a very long time.

Posted in Libraries and librarians, Library day in the life | Comments Off on Library day in the life, Spring 2022 (part 1)