Library day in the life, Spring 2022 (part 2)

This post is an account of what I did at work for four days in Mar/Apr 2022. The idea is to give an impression of the range of tasks I engage in during my work as librarian at the Francis Crick Institute. I’ve included some reflections and mini-rants so it’s not just a list of actions. I’ve done this a few times over the years – the last time was in...

Apr 2022

Library day in the life, Spring 2022 (part 1)

This post is an account of what I did at work for four days in Feb 2022. The idea is to give an impression of the range of tasks I engage in during my work as librarian at the Francis Crick Institute. I’ve included some reflections and mini-rants so it’s not just a list of actions. I’ve done this a few times over the years – the last time was in 2018....

Apr 2022

FAIR data in practice

Introducing the next Open Research London event, which will be about FAIR data.  It’s easy to agree that making research data FAIR is A Good Thing. Of course research data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. But is it imperative that all research data should be FAIR? If not, how do we identify those subsets that do need to be...

Jan 2022

Publishing incrementally – micropublications

Looking back and looking forward I recently received a reminder that it was my 13th anniversary of joining Twitter. I signed up to Twitter as a result of attending the Science Blogging conference in London in 2008 where I heard how useful it could be. I’d heard about Twitter previously, but was not persuaded it would be useful to me.  Well, it has...

Sep 2021

Page charges and OA policies

Much of my time in the past 12 months has been committed to preparing for compliance with the Coalition S / Wellcome open access policies. Because we have core funding from Wellcome this means that all research papers submitted on or after 1 Jan 2021 must comply with their new OA policy. So I have been buried in transformative deals, transformative...

Jun 2021

Preprints and science news

I’ve written before about preprints and science news. That blogpost was occasioned by the open letter last summer from Fiona Fox at the Science Media Centre on the subject, and the follow-up comment piece by Tom Sheldon in Nature. Mine was just one of several responses, most of which sought to defend preprints from the perceived attack. The discussion...

Feb 2019

Diversithon – some recipes

Recipe 1 It’s a simple recipe. Gather together some people who want to change the world. Put some inspirational speakers in front of them to get people fired up about diversity in science. Provide cakes and biscuits. Teach some basic skills in editing and writing for Wikipedia, then set them loose on a list of scientists who deserve, but don’t yet...

Dec 2018

Tracking less tangible research outputs

When I spot a problem then I start wondering what the solution is. It might be a bottleneck in some workflow, or a process that requires excessive effort to achieve a small effect. So I feel that there must be some way to improve the situation. Sometimes I can find a better way, other times I’m defeated – I throw up my arms and say “sorry – can’t help!”...

Nov 2018

Scientific archives workshop 2018

I attended the Second Workshop on Scientific Archives held at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, D.C. on the 13 & 14 August 2018. The first Workshop on Scientific Archives was held at EMBL in 2016, and was organised entirely by Anne-Flore Laloe, the archivist at EMBL. It was (I think) the first time that archivists working in the...

Nov 2018

Library day in the life 2018

This post is an account of what I did at work each day from Monday 17 September 2018 through to Friday 21 September 2018. The idea is to give an impression of the range of tasks I engage in. I’ve done it four times previously, starting in 2011. I explain more about ‘Library day in the life’ in my Library day in the life 2016 post. Monday 17 Sep I...

Sep 2018