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The following details responses to comments posted on a previous blog about the ‘Age of Bioscience’, the BBSRC Strategic Plan 2010-2015. The comments facility was made available at the launch of the plan on 28 January and was left open for 2 weeks.
Continue reading: Responses to comments on BBSRC Strategic Plan 2010-2015
Unlike the Spartoí, born of dragon’s teeth, Strategic Plans do not spring fully formed from the earth. Ours, which was launched this week with an accompanying video, represents the culmination of considerable work and extensive consultations with our community and with our Strategy Panels and Strategy Advisory Board. Indeed the formal consultation phase attracted more than 120 written replies from individuals and organisations. Under the strapline the Age of Bioscience, the resulting document (PDF) both celebrates the strength and importance of UK Bioscience, and sets out a most exciting vision of how BBSRC science can continue to contribute hugely to the health and wealth of the nation (and globally). As part of our continuing consultation, reactions to the strategic plans are invited via this blog or via twitter.
Continue reading: Strategic plans, ageing and food security
BBSRC’s new Strategic Plan for 2010-2015 launches today entitled ‘The age of bioscience’.
The plan is accompanied by a video including an introduction from me followed by an explanation of the place of bioscience research in the world and the vital role played by the BBSRC research community.
You can read the Strategic Plan and then post your feedback, comments and questions on this blog. Alternatively, if you are on Twitter, you can leave a comment on my Twitter page twitter.com/dbkell.
Comments will be collated, and we will respond as soon as possible after commenting has closed on 11 February 2010.
It is not news that in order to make principled use of the data, ideas and knowledge from a scientific paper it is necessary to have read it. However, there are two immediate problems with this ostensibly simple fact. The first is that it is necessary to have access to the paper in the first place, and traditional publishing models require that the user needs to pay for this privilege – and not all can do so. The second is that even if one does have access to the paper, one potentially has access to millions of them (as I mention regularly, PubMed alone is increasing its list of peer-reviewed papers in biomedicine by two per minute!), so clearly any individual scientist (or layperson) needs means to prioritise those that they might wish to read. UKPubMedCentral (UKPMC) is a new service that is intended to provide them.
Continue reading: UKPubMedCentral – an Open Access digital library of biomedical science
Much of last week was spent in Norwich, first at a moving memorial event for Chris Lamb (obituary) and then in various discussions about scientific strategies for both the John Innes Centre (JIC) and the Norwich Research Park (NRP) more generally. Scientific research and development represent the major drivers of economic growth throughout history, and the NRP is recognized as an extremely important contributor to the economic life of the region (and the UK generally). Thus, an economic impact report commissioned in 2008 shows that the John Innes Centre contributes over £170M annually to the UK economy, demonstrating both the impact and relevance of the excellent scientific research undertaken, and validating the investment of public funding to support it.
Continue reading: Crop, diet and health research in Norwich
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