Category Archives: Science

ICYMI No. 2: Time for positive action on negative results

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Stephen

Today I had a short opinion piece in Chemical and Engineering News on publishing negative results, a topic that I covered about this time last year in the Guardian on the occasion of the publication my lab’s first paper on an … Continue reading →

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Open access and public engagement: I need your help

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Stephen

Dear Reader, I would appreciate your help. I am working on a chapter for a book on openness within science (to be published by Manchester University Press). The book is part of the ‘Making Science Public’ program run by Prof … Continue reading →

Posted in Academic publishing, Science | 10 Comments

Anatomy of a blog post on the anatomy of a scientific discovery

Posted on January 26, 2016 by Stephen

At the risk of getting uber-meta, here is a blog post about writing my latest blog post at the Guardian. This was an account of a scientific discovery, albeit a minor one, that occurred during the process of shepherding the latest paper … Continue reading →

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ICYMI No.1: Preprints for biologists

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Stephen

Since I have developed a habit of writing elsewhere, which necessarily takes time and words away from the blog here at Reciprocal Space, I thought I would try to make amends by developing the habit of linking to the pieces … Continue reading →

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Jolly good fellows: Royal Society publishes journal citation distributions

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Stephen

Full marks and a side order of brownie points for the Royal Society: they have started publishing the citation distributions for all their journals. This might seem like an unusual and rather technical move to celebrate but it matters. It … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Access, Science | 4 Comments

Structural Biology: a beginner’s guide?

Posted on October 17, 2015 by Stephen

I got impatient waiting for my latest review article to come out, so here it is. The scheduled publication date has slipped twice now without the publisher getting in touch to explain why. The latest I’ve heard, after querying the … Continue reading →

Posted in Protein Crystallography, Science | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Lunacy and sanity

Posted on September 29, 2015 by Stephen

It’s less than 24 hours, so this still counts as a timely post. I guess I had been primed because I had been thinking about it. But although I hadn’t set my alarm I found myself awake at 02:52 on … Continue reading →

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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

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

Prize-winning video

Posted on December 6, 2014 by Stephen

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

Posted in Communication, Science, Science & Media | 4 Comments

Debating the role of metrics in research assessment

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Stephen

I spent all of today attending the “In metrics we trust?” workshop organised jointly by HEFCE and the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at Sussex University. This was part of the information-gathering process of HEFCE’s independent review of the role of … Continue reading →

Posted in Science, Scientific Life | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Advice on presentations: I’m not as clever as you think

Posted on July 23, 2014 by Stephen

I spent the last two days in Leicester at Translation UK, a two-day conference that is an annual gathering for scientists working on all aspects of translation — the protein synthesis kind. The conference is friendly and informal. It is … Continue reading →

Posted in Science | 8 Comments