And so to another Open Access event, this time a panel discussion that was part of the Science Festival. The panel consisted of Cameron Neylon, the Director of Advocacy at PLOS journals; David Carr, a Policy Advisor at the Wellcome Trust; Neil Hammond, a Senior Commissioning Editor at Cambridge University Press (CUP); and my old friend (!) Rupert Gatti, the founder of Open Book Publishers.
And so to another Open Access event, this time a panel discussion that was part of the Science Festival. The panel consisted of Cameron Neylon, the Director of Advocacy at PLOS journals; David Carr, a Policy Advisor at the Wellcome Trust; Neil Hammond, a Senior Commissioning Editor at Cambridge University Press (CUP); and my old friend (!) Rupert Gatti, the founder of Open Book Publishers.
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It's been a hectic few weeks, what with all this science festival stuff going on, and I'm just about catching up with myself! I went to an interactive event on Monday night that looked at the issue of cognitive enhancers (or 'smart drugs') and whether they have a useful role to play in society.
The Cambridge Science Festival is in full swing at the moment and I went to a talk in the Department of Chemistry last Thursday, entitled 'Challenging the price of drugs'. This talk caught my attention when I was going through the festival booklet, as my MSc and PhD research was in the area of pharmacology, and the process of drug development is something that still interests me very much.
I attended a lecture on open access publishing that was given by Dr Rupert Gatti last Tuesday at Anglia Ruskin University, and which was organized by the Cambridge Publishing Society (CAMPUS).
Dr Gatti is an academic and economist at Trinity College who, along with a colleague, founded Open Book Publishers, a not-for-profit company dedicated to publishing and providing free access to academic research. He spoke about the need for an alternative publishing model to the one that currently stands, based as it is on 'medieval' principles (his words!), which utilizes the massive advances that have occurred in technology to allow the free dissemination of academic knowledge to the masses. The present system is, according to the speaker, economically unsustainable, and places too much power in the hands of the publishing houses: he argues that now as academics have the technological wherewithal to self-publish, the traditional role of the publisher should be challenged. I've been sick. Very sick. I spent all of last week sneezing, coughing, blowing my nose, complaining about how sick I was, and infecting everyone in my immediate environment. I hate being sick and not being able to do things - my routine is very important to me and I get quite distressed if it is interfered with in any way. And I haven't been able to sing at all, which is most upsetting (although, some people might argue this is no bad thing).
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Really, it contains a little bit of everything, from a celebration of science and the English language to the joys of travel and the Shipping Forecast. The title ('Meanderings') is a fairly accurate description of its content: I write about different things as the mood takes me, but hopefully there's something in here for everyone... Categories
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March 2021
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