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 experiment that didn’t work out. Basically, I think it’s a good idea.

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 Brigitte Nerlich at Nottingham University and aims to take a critical look at the dilemmas of open science.

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 from my lab to publication. Why write about writing this post? Because maybe it will help others, and maybe it will help me to think it through.

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 that appear in other corners of the internet.  To kick off therefore, permit me to alert you to a short article this week published in The Biologist, the house magazine of the Royal Society of Biology.

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 will help to lift the heavy stone of the journal impact factor that has been squeezing the life out of the body scientific.

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 editor who commissioned the piece, is that it will be out by the end of the month. But I’ve paid my £500 fee to make the work open access and don’t see any good reason to delay further.

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 Monday morning – I can still see the digital display – and so I got up, checked out the window that the moon was visible (it was – and already mostly eclipsed), dressed and hurried downstairs, grabbing my camera and binoculars on the way.

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.

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 up loading the first draft with too much historical and philosophical baggage.

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 a project come to such fruition.