Author Archives: Stephen

Pre-prints: just do it?

Posted on July 17, 2015 by Stephen

There is momentum building behind the adoption of pre-print servers in the life sciences. Ron Vale, a professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology at UCSF and Lasker Award winner, has just added a further powerful impulse to this movement in … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Access, Science, Scientific Life | 16 Comments

Data not shown: time to distribute some common sense about impact factors

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Stephen

It’s that time of year when all clear-thinking people die a little inside: the latest set of journal impact factors has just been released. Although there was an initial flurry of activity on Twitter last week when the 2015 Journal … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Access | 10 Comments

Can we amend the laws of scholarly publication?

Posted on April 29, 2015 by Stephen

As part of its celebrations to mark the 350th anniversary of the publication of Philosophical Transactions, the world’s longest-running scientific journal, the Royal Society has organised a conference to examine ‘The Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication’. The first half of the meeting, held over … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Access, Scientific Life | 16 Comments

Open access: a national licence is not the answer

Posted on April 8, 2015 by Stephen

“Open Access: Is a national licence the answer?” is a proposal by David Price and Sarah Chaytor of University College London for a mechanism to provide full access to everyone within the UK to all published research. It was published on 31 … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Access | Tagged , | 10 Comments

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

Posted on March 30, 2015 by Stephen

Dear Publishers Association I ask that you amend the open access decision tree you created for incorporation into the guidance notes accompanying the Open Access (OA) policy announced by Research Councils UK (RCUK) in 2013. It may seem odd to … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Access | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Being mortal and being Crick

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Stephen

Two more book reviews from my reading list for this year. On several occasions while reading Being Mortal, surgeon Atul Gawande’s book about end-of-life care, I could feel a lump swelling in my throat and tears behind my eyes pressing … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Review | Tagged , | 1 Comment

The biologist who left me out in the cold

Posted on February 12, 2015 by Stephen

Two weeks, two books. In Unweaving the Rainbow Richard Dawkins takes issue with the poets. He argues that the poetry revealed deep within Nature by scientific investigation is more wondrous than the musings of those who make do with superficial … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Review | Tagged , | 3 Comments

This week – reading, thinking and linking

Posted on February 7, 2015 by Stephen

This past week I have been doing so much reading and writing for work that there has been no time to prepare anything substantial enough for a proper blog post, even if I have been stirred by the excessive protests … Continue reading →

Posted in Communication, History of Science, Science & Media, Science & Politics | Comments Off on This week – reading, thinking and linking

All That Is, by James Salter

Posted on January 31, 2015 by Stephen

In 2013 I was captured, captivated by the spare prose of James Salter’s The Hunters, a story of the tense competition between US fighter pilots in the Korean War. All That Is is similarly spare, and like The Hunters quite a masculine … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Review | Tagged | 7 Comments

Open access and the humanities

Posted on January 18, 2015 by Stephen

At the end of 2013 and 2014 I wrote blog posts on Occam’s Corner (over at the Guardian) to list and briefly review the books I read in each of those years. I want to develop this practice into a good habit … Continue reading →

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Impressions of Australia

Posted on December 31, 2014 by Stephen

I have been struggling to write something about my trip to Australia in August, my first visit to that great continent and undoubtedly a highlight of 2014. In my determination to get away from the rather banal what-I-did-on-my-lecture-tour-and-family-holiday trope, I ended … Continue reading →

Posted in Science, Travel | Tagged | 5 Comments

Vanity project

Posted on December 15, 2014 by Stephen

I haven’t written a book. And this is it. Well, I did write it of course. The words are mine. But there is nothing new here. I’ve just pulled together a selection of my blog posts from the last six … Continue reading →

Posted in Scientific Life | 10 Comments