Nature has an interesting news feature this week on impact factors. Eugenie Samuel Reich’s article — part of a special supplement covering various aspects of the rather ill-defined notion of impact — explores whether publication in journals such as Nature or Science is a game-changer for scientific careers. The widely-held assumption is that they are.

I had never heard of James Salter till I read a profile of him in the Observer a couple of weeks ago, on the occasion of the publication of his latest book, his first in a long time. Salter is 87 and has produced only six novels, two collections of short stories and a memoir in a writing career that has spanned six decades. He wrote his first novel following his time as a fighter pilot in the Korean War.

I am fascinated by the psychology of scientific fraudsters. What drives these people? If you are smart enough to fake results, surely you have the ability to do research properly? You should also be clever enough to realise that one day you will get caught. And you should know that fabricating results is a worthless exercise that runs completely counter to the spirit of enquiry. Why would anyone pervert their science with fakery?

The Christmas holiday has unmoored me. End of year exhaustion segued into a bout of ‘flu that knocked me onto my back, where I lay and ached, semi-detached by illness and medication as around me my family made preparations for a celebration that came and went. Even now, although I am recovering, a filmy phlegm clings to my throat, indifferent to coughing, and slides into my stomach while I sleep to nauseate my mornings.

A resonant blogpost is the gift that keeps on giving. One of the latest comments in my Sick of Impact Factors polemic bemoaning the corrosive effects of journal impact factors on scientific lives provided a link to a quite wonderful paper. I missed Alexis Verger’s comment when it dropped into my blog on August 31st.

My ‘Sick of Impact Factors‘ blog post seems to have struck much more of a chord than I anticipated. At the time of writing it has attracted over 12,900 page views and 460 tweets, far higher than my usual tallies. The post also generated over 130 comments, which is a daunting number for anyone who now stumbles across the post;

I was determined not to miss the transit of Venus today. Life’s too short. But this week I have relocated to St Raphael in the south of France for a conference on picornaviruses and had to leave my telescope behind. Despite this lack of equipment I roused myself from bed at 5:20 and went in search of the sunrise, hoping to be able to catch the tail end of the transit.

This is astonishing. Harvard is one of the best and one of the wealthiest universities in the world but last week its Faculty Advisory Council* announced that it can no longer afford to maintain its subscriptions to academic journals. The announcement was made online by the Council as a message to the academic staff at the university. I have taken the liberty of quoting it in full below.

Scientists’ quest for publication in journals with high impact factors is widely perceived as one of the more refractory barriers to the fuller adoption of open access, which I believe to be in the best interests of science. But the barrier problem is complicated.

I had an argument with my colleague in the tea-room the other day. Gratifyingly, I learned he had been reading my blogposts on the subject of open access, but it soon became clear he did not entirely share my enthusiasm for the topic. Specifically, he criticised open access journals such as PLoS ONE both for their lack of sub-editorial services and for creating a home for poor quality science.