Open Access gallops on

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Frank Norman

Note: I see that Stephen has beaten me to it with his post last night (does he never sleep?!?).  This post overlaps with his but not totally, so I decided to put it up anyway.

Progress towards the ideal of open access continues at a dizzying pace.

Benefits of OA

The UK Open Access Implementation Group have issued two reports on the economic impact of open access. The first report, Benefits of Open Access to Scholarly Research to the Public Sector, says that:

The UK public sector spends £135 million a year, made up of subscriptions and time spent trying to find articles, accessing the journal papers it needs to perform effectively. Each extra 5% of journal papers accessed via open access on the web would save the public purse £1.7 million, even if no subscription fees were to be saved.

The other report, Benefits of Open Access to Scholarly Research for Voluntary and Charitable Sector Organisations, details the benefits expected to accrue for those sectors.

The UK OAIG is a group working to make all UK research Open Access and includes RCUK and the Wellcome Trust.

Government support for OA

What a contrast with the dark days of 2004, when Sir Keith O’Nions, director general of the research councils, said in his evidence to a Select Committee enquiry:

I think it would be a pretty brave decision of the government at the present time to say it has sufficient confidence in the open access business model … to shift rapidly from something it knows and trusts to an open access model.

Now we have David Willetts, minister for science, writing in The Guardian that he will be:

announcing at the Publishers Association annual meeting that we will make publicly funded research accessible free of charge to readers. Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and will put the UK at the forefront of open research.

The Publishers Association, no less! That is a pretty clear message of firm intent from the Government. He says that the aim of the initiative is to “strengthen the information revolution” but also mentions a US report that found:

[the NIH] policy of open access has accelerated the transition from basic research to commercialisation, generated more follow-on research and reduced duplicate or dead-end lines of inquiry

Another article in The Guardian reports that the government has drafted in WIkpiedia-founder Jimmy Wales to advise on this work.

He will initially advise the research councils on its £2m Gateway to Research project, a website that will act as a portal, linking to publicly funded UK research all over the web. “Jimmy Wales can make sure that we maximise the collaborative potential, the added value from that portal,” Willetts said.

Wales will also feed ideas into the work of Dame Janet Finch, a former vice-chancellor of Keele University, who was asked by Willetts to convene academics, librarians and publishers to work out how an open-access scheme for publicly funded research might work in the UK. Her recommendations to government are expected in June this year.

He’s also going to be advising us on the format in which academic papers should be published and data standards. One of the big opportunities is, right now, a journal article might be published but the underlying data isn’t and we want to move into a world where the data is published alongside an article in an open format, available free of charge.

It will be interesting, to say the least, to see what the publishers will make of all this.

OA advocacy

A few weeks back it was announced that Cameron Neylon, a scientist at STFC and one of the most influential advocates for open access, open data and open science, is moving to become the Director of Advocacy for Public Library of Science (PLoS). An interview with Cameron was published last week on the Scholarly Kitchen blog, which describes him as “one of the most thoughtful and thorough proponents of OA and opening science in general”.

He has interesting comments on economies of scale in publishing and the value of small-scale specialised publishers.  He points out that small is beautiful and cheaper. He also looks at the function of the scientific literature, and whether a traditional journal article is really the best way to communicate scientific findings.

This is mostly stuff that he and others have been saying for several years, but now it is becoming mainstream.

Well worth a read.

Posted in Open Access | 2 Comments

Wordy, wooden, weak-verbed

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Frank Norman

A piece in today’s Times Higher, on the flaws of academic writing styles, struck a chord with me.  It says:

If you have ever needlessly added the term “Foucauldian” to a journal article or bludgeoned readers by starting an epic sentence with reference to the “post-Mendel application of Lamarck’s apparently superseded scientific theory by non-empirical social scientists”, then you have followed the trend for “wordy, wooden, weak-verbed” writing that dominates academic prose.

When editing text from scientists I seem to be forever adding verbs to sentences, or teasing apart dense clusters of adjectival nouns. I was beginning to think there was something wrong with me, so it was nice to see that I am not alone in struggling to read that kind of writing.

Of course when you are trying to boil down a 3,000 word article into a thick 1500 syrup, for Nature or similar, then the style can end up spare and unforgiving. Authors burn off any excess verbiage in order to meet the demands of the prestige journal.

When you are unconstrained by word limits, though, why not try putting back some of those missing connecting words that aid comprehension. Strive for sentences in the style

The cat sat on the mat

Avoid what the Times Higher article describes as “dull titles, formulaic structures, dull, passive prose and multisyllabic, abstract nouns.

Posted in Writing | 5 Comments

Collecting, connecting, communicating

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Frank Norman

Librarians collect stuff. To collect is one of the most important verbs in the librarian’s instruction manual. Probably the next most important is to categorise. There is a connection between these two. We do not collect randomly but with a focus, a pattern. I spot a connection, or a co-incidence, and add something to the collection. I fill gaps to complete a pattern. I always delight to find connections in unexpected places, to recognise the pattern in a group of divergent items. And finally I must tell potential library users what we have, or communicate to them the contents of the library.

How many items do you need to have a collection? I think one item is a starting-point but not a collection. A pair is showing promise, and three items is the start of a trend. Four items is certainly a collection and with five you are definitely onto something. Round about seven items something happens and as you head towards ten you may need to start subdividing the collection.

I have observed that the way I think up possible topics for blog posts is rather similar to my habits as a librarian. I collect factoids – nuggets of news, observations and opinions – then I make links between them and previous observations stored in that leaky place I call my memory. Sometimes I will start to feel that I want to tell the story and my fingers itch to write something down.

What makes me want to write? The topic may be intrinsically interesting (that is, to me) or be something that I feel a mission to tell you about. I may spot an interesting coincidence or pattern between two or three news announcements. Often (too often?) I make a connection between something happening today and something I recall from my past experience. (I realise now why ‘old’ people seem to talk about the past a lot; it is just because their range of experience stretches back in time and so they often find connections ‘back then’ to talk about).

If I have just one point to start from then I will have to do a bit of work – researching and fleshing out the point with some further facts, or (rarely for me) giving my own opinion. I feel more comfortable if I have three points to start from, then I can enclose a space by drawing lines between the points. I can test out the connections – stretching them a bit and rearranging them. I might realise that what I thought at first was interesting is in fact rather dull, or pointless, or obvious. Quite often I feel that one day, but then a few days later it looks interesting again and I wonder whether it is self-doubt or a reality check. The danger with my three-point turn is ending up with a list: “There is X. There is Y. There is Z”. That does not make for an interesting blogpost. The next step, I now realise, is to tell a story.

Last week I went to a SameAs meeting about storytelling. I have a couple more storytelling things to relate, but I will save them for later (note my careful list avoidance!). The evening meeting included three very different talks (uh oh, I sense a list coming).

Irene Ros and Alex Graul talked about data-driven journalism, or telling stories through data visualisation. They drew an interesting parallel with photojournalism, where the context of a picture can be vital to the story, there may be multiple stories going on in one picture, and the framing of the photograph can affect the story being told. The same is true for data in journalism. It is easy to mislead (tell the wrong story) by showing partial data or by ignoring the context. It is easy to distort the presentation of data by cunning choice of colour, e.g. making a story seem bleaker by choosing dark colours. Although one might think that data-driven stories are objective, in fact it comes down to a matter of trust. Do you trust the journalist to portray the data honestly.

Ed Yong told us a story that brought us back to a more traditional realm of storytelling, but not that traditional. He told us it was a metametameta story. Once upon a time, 300 million years ago, there was a mayfly that made an imprint in some mud. The impression survived as a fossil. Fast forward to just a few years ago. A student found an unpublished thesis from 1929 that described an area rich in fossils. His supervisor then went in search of the area, got lost in a swamp and then found the place with its treasure trove of fossils. Striking a piece of sandstone he found the mayfly imprint. Later he published his findings in PNAS. Ed Yong saw the paper, became interested and uncovered all the layers of the story that lay behind the paper.

Ed believes that we should have more of this – not just the story of the science but the story behind the science. He admitted that this was easier in paleontology and behavioural science than in biomolecular sciences, where your characters are all molecules rather than 300 million year old insects. Sean Bechhofer wrote up his thoughts on Ed’s talk over on his Humbly Report blog, if you want to read more.

The last speaker of the evening was Tassos Stevens, who told us that he had run away from academic science to joing the theatre. He got us to play a game called “What happens next”, where members of the audience make up a story one step at a time.  He started us off and then asked “What happens next?” and slowly the story built. He emphasised that this impulse to know “what happens next” is a key driver in our love of stories. Tassos referred to the moment “sharp intake of breath” Then he told us the story of Pericles, Prince of Tyre – one of Shakespeare’s less well-known plays – using the same technique, inviting us to guess the story.  We did more or less get there eventually. It was interesting how repeating patterns in the story emerged – princesses, sexual intrigue, sea journeys, and pirates. Tassos observed that elegant storytelling often involves this kind of recapitulation or echo, using what has gone before.

The essence of a story then is the what happens next moment, the pivotal point in the sequence

Action – Uncertain outcome – Present moment (suspense) – Resolution

That is the point when we take a sharp intake of breath and time stands still as wait to see what happens next. Tassos suggested that the most satisfying answer to what happens next is often the thing that we didn’t know we wanted to happen, which makes some kind of sense to me.

What happened next after I left the SameAs event was a realisation that storytelling is a skill that I need to work on.  I spotted a nice video by Ira Glass on the subject – he points out that “creative excellence takes time to develop. It also comes with hard work”. I then got to reflecting on the connections and differences between storytelling and curating. The skill of curating was emphasised in a blogpost by a US librarian, John Farrier. He says you have to know your audience, then compile potential content and “pitch your content to the audience in an attention-grabbing way”.  I think Storify and Pinterest are both examples of sites to exercise curation skills, and to tell a story or a narrative.

I recall ages ago reading something (I think by Lorcan Dempsey, but I can’t quite remember) that compared the descriptions of objects produced by librarians, archivists and museum curators. Librarians catalogue books, describing the physical and intellectual characteristics of the book in a fairly dry way. Archivists catalogue unpublished documents and collections in a hierarchical way; they are concerned not just with the document itself but the context of the person or organisation.  Archive catalogues tell more of a story than book catalogues. Museum object descriptions are more explicitly narratives that try to explain the significance of an object and explain what it means. I never did get down to digesting that half-formed thought, about catalogues and narratives and different styles of metadata-making. That will have to be the story for a future blogpost.

Posted in Blogology, Libraries and librarians, Uncategorized, Writing | 4 Comments

A rearward look at rewards: celebrations and celebrities

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Frank Norman

Last autumn I had the pleasure of attending the awards ceremonies for two science writing prizes. They are similar competitions but have individual characteristics and constraints: the Max Perutz prize is sponsored by the MRC, which is a taxpayer-funded organisation and a distant branch of government; the Wellcome Trust prize is sponsored by Wellcome, an independent charity.

The Wellcome Trust competition is open to anyone, with one category for scientists of postgraduate level and above and another category for those with a non-professional interest in science, including undergraduate students. It attracted nearly 800 entries across the two categories. The MRC competition is more narrowly focused, restricted to MRC-funded PhD students, and attracted something like 150 entries.

The Wellcome prize was new in 2011 and they put in a good deal of work in advance to make sure the world knew that it had arrived. The prize is sponsored by The Guardian and The Observer newspapers and during the spring The Guardian ran a series of articles on science writing, penned by some of the best science journalists and bloggers in the UK. As well as providing useful tips to those thinking of entering, it made sure that the competition was highly visible.  Wellcome shortlisted 15 entries in each of the two categories and awarded a prize to the winner of each category. All of those shortlisted were invited to attend a workshop on the business of writing, given by science writers from the Guardian, from the Wellcome Trust and Occam’s Typewriter’s very own Stephen Curry, who blogged about it at the time.

The Max Perutz science writing prize has been going for 14 years. It is publicised widely through MRC’s own channels. The MRC website has some condensed advice on science writing, digested from past competition judges.The judges shortlisted 12 entries and awarded first, second and third prizes. Again all of those shortlisted were invited to attend a workshop, given by Georgina Ferry on writing skills, helping them to further improve their essays.

The awards ceremonies were both impressive but quite different in character. MRC’s was held in the imposing setting of the Royal Society, a grand house in the style of a palazzo; Wellcome’s was held in the equally imposing surroundings of the Wellcome Collection, amidst the museum displays. Whereas Wellcome seemed to aspire to create the glitzy atmosphere of a celebrity awards ceremony, the MRC’s more intimate event felt  like a school prize giving.

The Wellcome ceremony was packed with science writers and science bloggers, including celebrities like our own Jenny, Richard and Stephen. There was food and drink aplenty, ensuring a good time was had by all. We were addressed by Sir Mark Walport, chief of the Wellcome Trust, by a journalist (Alok Jha) and by a comedian (Dara O Briain).  The actual awards were presented by Dara O Briain, with little ceremony. We didn’t learn much about the winners, let alone the other shortlisted writers, and the awarding seemed to be over very quickly. (I only discovered later that one of the winners had been a summer student in our Institute a few years back). It was almost as though the awards were a sideshow and we were all there just to party and enjoy each others’ fabulous company. All shortlisted essays are being published on the Wellcome Trust blog; the two winning essays were published in the Guardian or the Observer, and in Wellcome News.

The Max Perutz award ceremony was addressed by MRC chief executive Sir John Savill, by a scientist (Robin Perutz, Max’s son) and the science minister, David Willetts. (Well, that was the theory but in fact Willetts was called away to a vote in Parliament so we didn’t get to hear his speech. He was able to talk to the shortlisted essayists though and we were assured that he places importance on science writing.) There was a smaller crowd in attendance, and it had the feeling of a gathering of the MRC family. Robin Perutz quoted from a couple of letters his father had sent to a previous chief of the MRC; Harold Himsworth. I spoke to the PhD supervisor of the winner, who had travelled with her down from Dundee to support her. Sir John introduced each of the shortlisted writers, telling us about their background, affiliation and research area, as well as their essay topic. Each was then presented with a certificate. The winning essay was published in The Guardian and all twelve shortlisted entries were published as a PDF on the MRC website soon after the awards.

Both competitions are about science writing, aiming to build writing skills.  Wellcome say their competition aims to “find the next generation of undiscovered science writing talent”. MRC says its prize is “aimed at encouraging and recognising outstanding communication”. Both competitions give potential sciecne writers a reason to exercise their skills, and provide advice for all plus some extra coaching for the most skilled. I felt that the MRC ceremony put more emphasis on personal encouragement – it was like a family celebrating the achievements of its talented youngsters and saying “Didn’t they do well!”. The Wellcome ceremony seemed to celebrate the actiivity of science writing as a whole, in effect saying “Isn’t science writing great! Come and join us!”

Both are worthy competitions and I should congratulate all the winners and those shortlisted (and I hope I get invited to the 2012 awards too!).

Posted in Writing | 2 Comments

“Facebook for scientists”

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Frank Norman

Soon after Nature Network launched in 2007 it was being touted as the “Facebook for scientists”. Other sites that had been around longer, such as FriendFeed and LabSpaces, occasionally got that moniker too (and indeed Facebook bought out FriendFeed later on).  I view any use of the phrase “Facebook for scientists” with great suspicion.  At least Mendeley (the social and bibliographic management site) has the imagination to call themselves the Last.FM for science.

Brian Krueger, at LabSpaces, suggested why none of these sites have become dominant in the way that FaceBook has:

ResearchGate’s groups and Job listings appear to be relatively active, Nature Network has its blogs and forum, and LabSpaces has the news and Blogs. However it seems like, at least for LabSpaces, I’ve just catered to the scientists who were willing to interact on-line…

The attraction of scientists to a network is not going to be the network itself, that’s apparent, so it’s going to come down to developing a network around tools that help make a scientist’s life easier. The “problem” for developers is that the number of tools that overlap between fields and disciplines is too small for any network to really dominate the science social network landscape which could limit large scale investment in social network based free tools.

Daniel Mietchen agreed with this diagnosis:

It’s a small, dedicated group advocating for open science and social networks.  Despite this fact, the latter have been “breeding like rabbits,” as Cameron Neylon noted in this 2008 post.  At that time he counted about a dozen contenders for the title of “facebook for scientists” (including, Laboratree,Research Gate, Epernicus,LabMeeting, Graduate Junction,Nature Network).  But none of them, not even Nature Network, have been able to dominate the field in the manner of a Facebook.

So, they still cater to a minority of scientists; to those who enjoy that kind of online interaction for its own sake.  They haven’t made themselves indispensable to the broad mass of scientists.  And it is unlikely that any one site could serve such a diverse market as “scientists” in all disciplines.

ResearchGate, founded in 2008, is currently getting a good deal of publicity. I have had several emails and a couple of phone calls from them in the last few months. The dreaded FB phrase has appeared in some press coverage. A New York Times article about open science devotes quite a bit of space to ResearchGate, and The Economist just published a short piece.

ResearchGate has been growing rapidly in terms of membership, numbers of staff and has some serious investors. It is based in Berlin and Boston, established by a medical researcher at Harvard Med School, Ijad Madisch. The NYT piece says:

Dr. Rajiv Gupta, a radiology instructor who supervised Dr. Madisch at Harvard and was one of ResearchGate’s first investors, called it “a great site for serious research and research collaboration.”  [It has] profile pages, comments, groups, job listings, and “like” and “follow” buttons can pose and answer questions… Users can create public or private discussion groups, and share papers and lecture materials. ResearchGate is also developing a “reputation score” to reward members for online contributions.

Nature Network has a similar range of functions and also has an app platform, or workbench, but it has seemed a bit neglected in recent years. When I first looked at ResearchGate a year or two back I thought it looked nice enough but it was hard to know whether it would really take off. My impression was that it was quite international, with many users from non-Western countries – not just the usual suspects. Other competitors include LabLife, Scientific Advisory Board and Academia.edu

Here is some advertising blurb from ResearchGate, to give you more of a flavour of what they aim to achieve.

ResearchGate www.researchgate.net is the world's largest 
professional network for scientists and researchers with over 
1,300,000 members worldwide and it is completely free.
As a member of ResearchGate, you can:
  • Ask questions and get answers from fellow specialists within your field
  • Find and download unique publications easily by
    searching through 45 million abstracts. Numerous papers available include negative results, which can only be found on ResearchGate
  • Download full texts uploaded by the authors for free
  • Follow Topics that match your research interests
  • Share current articles, publications and other content with your colleagues
  • Search through over 5,000 scientific conferences
  • By having a profile on ResearchGate members
    are able to present their work to the wider scientific community as well as sharing their research aims, and academic pursuits.
Find out more about ResearchGate (see this article) from one of 
the founders Ijad Madisch, himself a Scientist:
"The pre-existing scientific community was conducted in a 
vacuum," Madisch said. "I was encountering problems with my 
own research during medical school and at a fellowship at Harvard."

I used to get excited about all these wonderful new sites, all shiny and new. Now there are so many I can’t help but suspect that some (most?) of them will go the way of BioMedNet. In 1995 it was briefly the most exciting place on the biomedical web but a few years later seemed to lose its way.  Eventually, in 2004, it closed down.

Posted in Research tools, Social networking | 19 Comments

Answering searching questions

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Frank Norman

For twenty years we have had some sort of desktop access to the scientific literature. At first we only had abstracts of articles, and accessed them through fairly clunky interfaces (anyone remember BIDS?). The introduction of PubMed in 1997 improved the interface, but still had only abstracts. These days, in most research institutes and universities, the full-text of a huge proportion of the world’s scientific research is available through a simple web interface.

That availability has changed the way we use the literature. Long gone is the idea of the one-off “literature search”, an attempt to provide a comprehensive list of papers on a specific topic. Searching is no longer something you have to sit down and plan. More often we just use a quick search on PubMed or Google to answer a question, such as “what genes affect xxx process”, and may do this many times in a day.

But PubMed and similar systems are not very good at answering questions; they were designed as ways to find articles. In fact the whole scholarly publication system is not set up in a way that facilitates answering questions. Journal articles are blocks of text – descriptions of methods, results and discussion – with images and figures interlaced. They are not machine-readable databases of facts. Scientific literature is not part of the semantic web.

Text-mining and semantic technology sets out to remedy, or perhaps side-step, this. Software like Textpresso has been going a few years and has powered a query system for a limited range of subject domains (including Drosophila). Now UKPMC has launched a new feature – Evidence Finder – that helps you to ask questions across the whole of PubMedCentral – that’s over 400k articles, or 10,004,566 sentences about genes, proteins, diseases & metabolites. This new tool has been developed by UKPMC Labs

UKPMC Labs is a new component of the UKPMC website, which will showcase novel applications based on UKPMC content.

Evidence Finder is not as slick as Textpresso. The results you get come as a list of articles, not an answer to your question. The exact question you ask can affect your results – “affects”, “controls” and “regulates” all give different results. I still have the feeling that I am searching, not mining. On the plus side, on the page of results there is a box with some alternative questions that you might have wanted to ask.

Added 17 Feb 2012

Thanks to UKPMC for pointing out I had misunderstood how Evidence Finder is intended to work. First you should search for the disease, gene, protein or other entity that you are interested in.  Then choose a question from the list on the right, to further refine your search.

The title “Evidence Finder” suggests to me that the tool is aimed at clinical questions and evidence-based medicine, a bit like PubMed’s Clinical Queries. I like the simplicity of the interface, and I appreciate there is a balance between creating a powerful interface with bells and whistles and keeping it simple to use. It is also much harder to tailor an interface that has to cope with a very wide range of topics.

But it is early days and Evidence Finder look promising.  Try it out and give them feedback.

Oh, and try to make sure that all your research goes into UKPMC so that it can be part of the evidence base!

Posted in Searching | Tagged , | 9 Comments

Library Day in the Life – weekly round up

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Frank Norman

Last year I took part in Library Day in the Life (#libday7). For one week I wrote a daily post on Google+ about what I had done during the day, and an end-of-week round-up. I enjoyed the experience and the chance to stand back a little and look at what I do, reflecting on what is important in my work. Therefore I decided to join in #libday8, which took place last week.

This year I decided to put my daily posts onto Posterous. Google+ seems to have faded from view a bit, and I thought it might be useful for me to get set up on Posterous. I probably should have got myself sorted out on Posterous before the week started. I had a few teething troubles, but I think I understand how the site works now. I liked the simple text editor.

My biggest problem with last week was lack of time. It was not a normal week for me: three meetings took up a day and a half between them, one big piece of work took about the same, and I also had to spend quite a bit of time drafting my annual appraisal report. All in all, it was a miracle I had time to do any other tasks. As the week progressed the writing of my daily report got pushed later and later into the evening and eventually disappeared. However, I made notes each day and finished off the outstanding posts yesterday evening.

It was a good time to be doing some of that reflecting I mentioned above as I also had to look back at the past year for my own appraisal report, and for the Library annual report. The broad themes of my #libday8 week were similar to those in my ‘#libday7 week – writing, editing, disseminating, journals – but subtly different, looking more towards the future and more broadly at the publishing world.

The future is represented by The Francis Crick Institute. My institute will close and become absorbed into this new organisation in 2015.  Much remains to be decided, but one of my meetings last week was concerned with looking at the way Library and Information services can be delivered at The Crick.  Helping to define this will be a major task for me over the next few years. Another meeting was concerned with issues of how information resources are licensed, and the changing face of higher education.  The RWA furore and the Elsevier boycott, as discussed by Stephen, also featured in my week.

More parochially I was busy with the final stages of producing our Institute Annual Report and with pushing out short news reports on the website, about some of our scientists’ more significant papers.  Both tasks can be quite time-consuming and brain-demolishing.  Helping to keep internal comms flowing smoothly took another slice of my time.  It is easy to forget that information doesn’t flow naturally – it has to be pushed, given a helping hand.

Looking back I note that coffee seems to help with that information flow.  Several times when I went for a coffee I seemed to bump into just the people I needed to see.  I wonder whether I should spend my day just walking round the Institute and bumping into people (note to boss, if you are reading this: I am not serious). Of course if everyone just replied immediately to the emails I send them things would be so much better!

Other things for the future will be managing the new Library space once the refurbishment is complete, and managing our new ebook service if we do decide to proceed with it. More news about those, hopefully, in #libday9 in about six months’ time.

Here are my daily posts from last week:

Posted in Libraries and librarians | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Science policy – my favourite sites

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Frank Norman

In a comment on a recent post, Jamie Christie asked me to list my top ten sites on research policy.  I thought this would be a difficult task; the best sites will vary depending on your particular interests, and some sites are important but not frequently updated.  But as I looked through my list I could easily spot which sites I tend to rely on.

  1. Nature news and comment – they used to have a number of separate newsfeeds and blogs but I think this is their main site.
  2. Science News – it includes content from both Science Now and Science Insider.
  3. Times Higher – it is mainly weekly, but does have more frequent updates to the breaking news section. Good for general academic issues.
  4. Royal Society and their policy blog In verbaRCUK (plus individual RCs pages, depending on your interests).
  5. Cordis – I thought the EU should be in there, but actually the sites I look at rarely have much of interest so I feel bad about including any of them.  This is probably the least bad.
  6. Science Business – a very good site on science in industry and science funding.
  7. Research Blogs (was called Exquisite Life) – always incisive commentary.
  8. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills – while this is not very focused on science, when it does have something on science it will be important.
  9. CaSE – very often has something of interest, and usually has a response to any major announcement.
  10. Wellcome Trust – mostly biomedical, but also has good material on broader research governance issues and public engagement.
  11. BBC science – news more than policy, but it’s a good catch-all.
  12. Guardian Science– again mostly news, but some of the comment is free pieces are good.

Another site cropped up this week that might be worth watching: Purse String Theory. It aims to cover science policy and funding.

Of course I could just have said “Twitter” – that’s the only site you need. There is something to be said for that point of view.  There are a number of Twitter lists for science policy. Here are some that look useful.

 

Posted in Research management | 3 Comments

The power of music

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Frank Norman

Some pieces of music really should carry a government health warning. The first time I saw Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde live, the Liebestod scene was unforgettable. The intensity of the music mounted and mounted, receded and then mounted again and again until the all-enveloping release of the climax. It made my heart race and I was panting for breath by the end. I know that at least two conductors have died while conducting Tristan and I wonder whether any audience members have suffered such a fate due to overexcitement caused by the music. I wouldn’t be surprised.

Another work that excites me to the point of danger, in a different way, is the film Koyaanisqatsi, with music by Philip Glass. The film came out in 1982 and I remember that it was screened at a cinema in London’s Charing Cross Road for many months. Whenever I walked past the cinema I saw this extraordinary word in big letters: K-O-Y-A-A-N-I-S-Q-A-T-S-I and wondered what on earth it meant. Then one day I watched the film and was mesmerized. Wikipedia describes it as a “visual tone poem”, which I think is about right. There is no dialogue, no characters, no action of a conventional kind. It shows the beauty and calmness of desert landscapes and the different beauty and frenzy of cityscapes, their people and machines. The subtitle is ‘Life out of balance‘, and there is a bit of an eco-political message behind it. I must confess I just enjoy the visuals and the music; they delight eye and ear and sweep me along.

Koyaanisqatsi is something of a cult film. It was a shock in 1982 to realise that I liked something that was cool.  I didn’t feel cool, I didn’t dress cool… I was a million miles from cool. I liked the film and its music not because it was cool, I just enjoyed it a lot. I have seen the film a few times in the cinema and listened to the CD of the music countless times; the music is embedded in my memory.

17 days - concert flyer

17 days - concert flyer

The choir that I sing in (Crouch End Festival Chorus or CEFC for short) is performing an excerpt from Koyaanisqatsi in a concert on 5 Feb. It is a strange experience to sing music that that I have never sung before though I have known it so well for so long. The music uses a typically (for Glass) unconventional sound pallette including wordless voices. With no text the singing comes across as instrumental, but with vocal colour. I never thought of the piece before as choral music and it is not in the regular choral repertoire. We have received special permission from the composer to perform this excerpt in our concert.

The Grid is a section of the film about 15 minutes long and features speeded-up time-lapse sequences of vehicles on the freeway, people walking along streets, workers in factories, commuters, data inputters, sausage machines, all with a tremendous sense of rushing.  The dynamic visuals combine with the triple-charged excitement of the music. I recall a couple of times in the cinema finding myself tensed-up, clutching the arms of my cinema seat at the end of this section. The section ends very abruptly and you feel like you just stepped off a precipice .

Philip Glass divides opinion.  Some music-lovers do not like his music. The music is repetitive; it is not like ‘normal’ music with a melody and development; its beauty is emergent.  Listening to it is a bit like watching a calm sea on a sunny day. Nothing happens but watching the sun glistening on the surface and the play of the rippling waves, always the same but ever-changing in their patterns, is beautiful. The Grid has the same scintillating quality. I am enjoying singing it, though it requires intense concentration and feverish counting. We have to sing like robots, matching the machine-like nature of the film. We in the choir have all been encouraged to watch the film. With no text to explain the “story” we need to understand the visual imagery to appreciate what we are singing about.

In the same concert we will also sing the Three Songs by Philip Glass, written a couple of years after The Grid. These are songs with words (by Octavio Paz, Leonard Cohen, and Raymond Levesque) , so they feel much more choral in character, but still have Glass’ trademark minimalism. My favourite of the three is the last song. It starts with humming, murmuring voices slowly moving through a harmonic progression. This continues to develop as the basses of the choir sing the melody. The words and melody move around the choir until finally a climax builds to the end.

17 Days

The choir has a track record of commissioning new music. Just as with funding science, you can never be quite sure what the result will be, so commissioning is a risky venture. It is commendable that CEFC has such a commitment to new music. The 5 Feb concert will feature the world premiere of a new piece by James McCarthy, called 17 Days. This is

based on the dramatic events surrounding the 2010 Chilean mining accident from which – eventually – 33 miners were successfully rescued

The title alludes to the length of time that the miners spent trapped underground with no contact from the outside world, before they were discovered. Just imagine. I know I get frustrated at work if our internet connection does down for a couple of hours. People were distraught at having a day without access to Wikipedia. Enduring 17 days with no communication at all from the outside world, not knowing whether you woud ever see the world outside again, let alone your loved ones. It is a terrifying and powerful story.

When I first heard about the commission I feared that an attempt to recreate the tale in music was too risky, but I was wrong. We have been rehearsing the piece for several weeks and it is majestic, moving and masterful.

Composer James McCarthy has the soul of a poet and he has responded to the theme in a poetic way. In his composer’s blog for the piece he says that poetic imagery often unlocks his musical imagination. His selection of texts ranges from Isaiah and the gospel of St John, to Rupert Brooke and Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Mew and Carole Lashof. His chosen texts reflect the feeling, the emotion of the story. For me the use of poetry gives great strength to the piece. McCarthy has a good ear for words and he takes great care over the sound of the words that we sing. Even with the best diction in the world an audience will not hear and understand every word that a choir sings, but they will hear the beauty of the sound of the words-and-music combined. Think of Mahler and the glorious word “Ewig” in his 8th symphony or “Auferstehen” in his 2nd symphony, or the marvellous words “Drop, drop slow tears” as set by William Walton in his anthem of that name. I have at times sung pieces (and some commissions!) by composers who were insensitive to the sounds of words. The results were not rewarding to sing nor engaging emotionally.

One of the poems was specially commissioned by McCarthy from Carol Lashof, a sonnet called We live in mud. McCarthy says this is the black heart of the piece; it represents the voice of the miners underground. On his composers blog he writes that Lashof “has a very special ability to write not just great poetry, but also to write singable texts instinctively”.

James McCarthy tells the story, then, through emotion rather than through narrative. And what a story it is. In a nutshell, it is a journey from darkness to light. A story of horrror, hope and glory. The music matches all these emotions. At times I find it difficult to sing as I’m shaken with emotion. He also uses a children’s choir that gives extra innocence and intensity to some sections (and always boosts the audience as their parents come to listen!).

We have a great concert in store and I really hoe that many people will come to listen and experience this music.  I feel that James McCarthy’s piece deserves to be widely heard. You will be affected by hearing it.

The choir’s publicity and digital media teams have been in overdrive for this concert. You can watch a video of James talking to the choir’s conductor, David Temple, which includes excerpts from one of our rehearsals if you want to get a little taster of the sound of 17 Days.  You can read James’ blog about the composition of the piece. He also writes about his choice of poems.

The concert is in the Barbican on Sunday 5 February 2011. See you there!

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Informing science and policy

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Frank Norman

Ian Gibson wrote last month in the Times Higher that we need a new generation of politically savvy scientists. He said

“many in the scientific community do not see it as their business to get involved in matters of policy. In fact, the grant-assessment system and career-progression paths militate against such involvement – after all, it distracts from the perceived all-important focus on the publication of research results in top journals. … it is essential for them to understand how science is used (and misused) by the hierarchies within government. There is a desperate need for a new generation to emerge within their disciplines with the muscle and confidence to influence legislators, politicians and civil servants alike on particular scientific policies.”

I was a bit surprised as I thought we already had a good cohort of politically-aware scientists.  Just looking around this site we have the Science is Vital veterans, Jenny, Richard and Stephen, as well as Sylvia and Athene who often write on policy issues.

Politically I always feel myself to be neutral.  I’m not of course: I have a bit of a Guardian habit and I generally tie my colours to that side of the mast. But I rarely engage with political arguments; I prefer to listen than to proffer my opinion.

In the workplace I usually assume a neutral position when it comes to institutional politics too. The Library is not aligned with any particular branch of science or section of the Institute but we know a bit about the whole range of science that goes on here. Hence I am seen as an impartial (and moderately knowledgeable) pair of hands. This means I am called on to take on various diverting tasks, such as writing up research news for the website, managing the Annual Report, and taking minutes for our Heads of Divisions (HoDs) meetings. The last one of those means that I occasionally get invited along to other interesting meetings (I sometimes suspect I am invited by mistake, but I’m not proud so I accept before they have a chance to withdraw the invite!).  I remember Richard Smith (ex-editor of the BMJ) giving a talk to the HoDs some years back on publishing and open access, and particularly remember a talk in 2001 by Ian Gibson, MP.

Ian Gibson was no ordinary MP. He had had a career as a biological scientist and academic, working with Conrad Waddington at Edinburgh, followed by a stint at Bloomington, Indiana then 30 years at UEA, Norwich, before leaving the academic life to join the House of Commons as MP for Norwich in 1997. Hence he spoke about science with authority and he understood the scientific life. When he visited us in 2001 he had just become chair of the House of Commons Select Committee on Science & Technology and he talked to us about science and politics. He told us that scientists ignore politics at their peril. This turned out to be prophetic.

I decided that I should do my bit to help back in 2001. Keeping yourself informed about science policy was not straightforward. There was no well-oiled information machine like the one that helps scientists to keep up-to-date with the literature of their field. Policy information often comes not from books and journals but from organisations, their reports and working papers, which can be hard to track down – what we librarians like to call “grey literature”. This is the sort of information I enjoyed working with years ago when I first worked in libraries.

In order to crack the science policy information nut I started scanning various websites every morning, on the lookout for interesting items of news about scientific research and policy. Science, Nature and the Times Higher were all rich sources at the end of each week but I also looked at research funders’ websites, learned societies, relevant government and non-departmental bodies websites, and scientific press release websites such as AlphaGalileo. Later on most sites started to produce RSS feeds so it became easier to scan for news.

At first I just posted occasional links on our intranet page to interesting news items, but later I started an RSS feed of my own, that could be displayed on the intranet page but was also accessible to others. My selection of what to include was guided by my knowledge of what was relevant to our science (hence flu and stem cells, for instance, often feature), our concerns (biological safety, research animals, health and safety) and to our institutional nature (research funding is interesting but undergraduate teaching is less so) and location (UK news, London news and some international news). Something about “teaching geochemistry in Shenzhen” would not make the grade, but something about “proposed UK legislation on stem cell research” definitely would. My feed also includes some funding news, news about scientific honours and prizes, some blogposts on policy or about the scientific life, and very occasionally something about a big scientific advance. I wanted to inform people not deluge them, so six or seven items each day is my limit.  If anyone wants a broader coverage they can look at SPIN from Wellcome.  A few years after I started this service the MRC Press Office started to send out a weekly digest of policy news.  It has a broader focus than my feed but is based mostly on newspaper and magazine sources.

I usually try to link to the original source of a news item, for example a statement from BIS about a new government initiative, but if there are interesting comments about the  initiative in a news source I may include that instead or as well. Choosing the right moment to include an item is not always obvious – when is it news rather than “this might happen”.  Do I just want to inform scientists about what has happened already or should I alert them to what might happen so that they can take action?  I include items about relevant Select Committee reports, but also include announcements of forthcoming enquiries and calls for evidence. The news that Science is Vital lobbied Parliament was interesting, but it was just as important to flag up in advance their call for scientists to get involved.

Is the feed still necessary? I have not done any formal evaluation of my newsfeed, but I get plenty of anecdotal feedback that people see the items I post and find at least some of them interesting. I also sometimes hear from website managers that they see a good deal of traffic coming from our site, so I know that people are clicking through. I think it is easier these days to find this kind of information.  Join twitter and follow a couple of dozen people interested in science policy and you will see all the news you could need.  I think my feed still has the edge, as it is focused keenly on the interests of this institute and (perhaps) has the odd quirky story that doesn’t spread on Twitter.

If you want to see what I think is interesting in biomedical research policy and news, check out the feed.

Posted in Research management | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments