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 the form, appropriately, of a pre-print posted to the bioRxiv just a few days ago. If you are a researcher and haven’t yet thought seriously about pre-prints, please read Vale’s article.

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 two days last week, sought to identify the key issues in the current landscape of scholarly communication and then

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 years and self-published it as a hard-back book titled A Thousand Nothings using the services of lulu.com. It wasn’t that hard. Still. It is a bit… awkward.

This morning I received an email from a publisher inviting me to write a chapter for an ‘upcoming hardcover edited collection’ on a topic of research to which I have made a number of contributions over the years. I politely declined because of the terms of the copyright transfer agreement that the publisher was good enough to provide up front.

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 metrics in research assessment;

Science has been extraordinarily successful at taking the measure of the world, but paradoxically the world finds it extraordinarily difficult to take the measure of science — or any type of scholarship for that matter. That is not for want of trying, as any researcher who has submitted a PhD thesis for examination or a manuscript for publication or an application for funding will know.

The Society for General Microbiology (SGM) kindly awarded me this year’s Peter Wildy Prize Lecture, which I delivered at their Spring meeting in Liverpool just a few weeks ago. The prize is given for “an outstanding contribution to microbiology education and/or communication in order to stimulate interest and understanding in the subject”. It sounds rather grand, but please don’t be put off.

Last night I lost my virginity. To be precise, I lost my Café Scientifique virginity because I gave a talk about science in a café in Portsmouth at the kind invitation of local organiser Maricar Jagger. It was a really good evening. I gave a short talk about my research and how I see my role as a scientist in modern Britain to a varied and interested audience who proceeded to ask lots of questions.

I’ve reached that age where my eye is drawn to the obituary column every time I open the newspaper. It hasn’t been a conscious move but, having arrived at my fiftieth year, I am increasingly aware of the hopes of youth shedding and floating away, like leaves from a tree, and find myself more often looking back over the road now travelled than peering into the future at the way ahead.

This is the original version (with the original title) of an article that has been published at The Conversation. Having climbed all the way to the Nobel prize on a ladder made of Nature, Science and Cell papers, biologist Randy Schekman has turned around and declared that he is going to boycott these ‘luxury’ journals in future because of the way that they damage science.