The week started with a joint Manchester-Brazil meeting on bioenergy and industrial biotechnology, where I learnt in particular about an enormous metagenomics programme at the Brazilian Centre for Bioethanol Science and Technology. Other Agriculture-related meetings included one with Mary Creagh, the Shadow Environment Secretary and one hosted at the Royal Society for the Governing Board of the Joint Programming Initiative on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change (FACCE-JPI).

I spoke at a meeting (pdf) of the Foundation for Science and Technology on the RCUK implementation of Open Access publishing based on the Finch report (Dame Janet Finch was one of the other speakers). With great timeliness, RCUK had earlier that day published its updated Open Access guidance, on which comments are being sought until March 20th. I also contributed to a video that BioMed Central are putting together on Open Access (a link will be given anon). [...]

After returning from the AAAS meeting that I described last week, we had one of our periodic meetings with the Directors and Deputy Directors of the Institutes that we fund strategically. This one was held at the Babraham Institute, where as usual an afternoon of scientific presentations and a laboratory tour was followed by a wide ranging agenda covering a variety of funding and strategic issues. We also had an excellent presentation on public dialogue from Sir Roland Jackson, Chair of our Bioscience for Society Strategy Panel.

With colleagues I also had a very useful meeting with Sir John Beddington, focussing mainly on the developing Agri-Tech strategy and our plans for Industrial Biotechnology. [...]

The majority of last week’s meetings were ‘internal’, mainly around planning for future activities, but I did join a very useful discussion with representatives of the Russell Group about the implementation of Open Access, a subject of increasing interest.

We had a very fruitful bilateral meeting (my first formal one) with Professor Ian Boyd, the new Defra Chief Scientific Adviser, covering a raft of topics of mutual interest in all areas of agriculture and environment, and a separate one including NERC Chief Executive Duncan Wingham with whom we are working up a number of joint programmes. [...]

Among a number of our community who were honoured in Her Majesty’s list of New Year Honours (pdf), I was especially delighted to see that our Deputy CEO and Chief Operating Officer Steve Visscher had been awarded a richly deserved CBE, for Services to the Support of Scientific Research. BBSRC’s formal announcement is elsewhere, so here all I shall record is many congratulations indeed to Steve!

Just before the break, the Government’s Intellectual Property Office published an important updated response (pdf) to the Hargreaves Review, setting down clear guidance as to how copyright is to be modernized to allow (among other things) researchers to make the best fair use of published research – which by definition needs to be Open Access. While Open Access has some transition costs (financial and otherwise) I do hope  that UK researchers will be alive, encouraged, and thereby well placed, to exploit the opportunities that such Open Access brings for innovation. [...]

Last week we had our third ‘roadshow’ conversation at what had been the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, where again we enjoyed a very useful and helpful dialogue with our community. I also took part in a very useful meeting held by Government Chief Scientific Adviser Sir John Beddington with a number of the Departmental CSAs and Research Council CEOs. These provide a very useful forum for topics where there is the potential for major cross-Government activity. An obvious area of present interest in the UK is the response of both the research base and regulators to the ash die-back disease cause by pathogenic variants of the fungus Chalara fraxinea, where BBSRC and partners had already initiated a call on Tree Health and Plant biosecurity. Hopefully by getting in early we can avoid the levels of tree loss seen with Dutch elm disease.

I also enjoyed a visit to Council member Jim Godfrey’s farm for a series of discussions of modern agriculture and the role of our research therein. It was very striking how very much science, and scientific approaches, do indeed contribute to modern successful agricultural enterprises. [...]