Author Archives: Frank Norman

Dating seems a bit old-fashioned these days, but mandating is becoming more and more popular, though it has to be admitted that there plenty of people who do not love it. I went to an interesting event on Friday called … Continue reading →

My first love in science was chemistry. It was the usual story of an inspiring and eccentric teacher who stoked my interest and got me hooked on transformations, equations and the periodic table. OK, so the bangs, colours and smells … Continue reading →

Earlier this year Heather drew attention to Vivian Siegel’s editorials on supporting outreach efforts and on authorship and acknowledgement. I’m ashamed to say I did not see Heather’s post at the time but am pleased to find it now as … Continue reading →

Paying for open access has been on my mind recently. All those “open choice”, “author choice”, “open option”, “open article”, “online open”, “open science” and other similar schemes (why does each publisher have to have a different name for the … Continue reading →

Bora wrote recently about various aspects of power and how “online” has changed the balance of power in different ways. I want to talk about how the advent of e-journals has changed the power of publishers and other players in … Continue reading →

I heaved a sigh of relief today. My last journal subscription wrinkle of 2009 has finally been ironed out. It’s a pretty big wrinkle (the big deal of one of the big four publishers) and needed a mighty iron to … Continue reading →

I wrote previously about copyright, and the way that entertainment is influencing science. If you are interested in that topic, then look up a review in this week’s Science of Laurence Lessig’s book Remix: an engaging read about how the … Continue reading →

I thought I was going mad this morning as I browsed the online contents page of today’s Nature issue. When I got to the sections for Articles and Letters, the entries looked longer than usual, due to the inclusion of … Continue reading →

I am a fan of JISC – the Joint Information Systems Committee – I reported on their annual conference recently. I would have liked to go to the debate they organised last week on Libraries of the Future (LOTF) but … Continue reading →

I’ve written before on the phenomenon of new journals. I’m particularly fascinated by the way that families of titles develop. In recent months we have seen Science Signaling out of the AAAS stable, EMBO Molecular Medicine from EMBO, and Nature … Continue reading →