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MIRI crosses the pond (Thoughts on PR)

March 19, 2010 By

Gift-wrapping MIRI for our NASA colleagues

NASA issued a press release yesterday to announce that the engineering test model of the mid-infrared instrument for its next-generation space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, has arrived at Goddard. A picture is featured in the BBC’s Science & Technology news section today. As a member of the team that is in charge of testing MIRI prior to its integration with the telescope and launch, I’m glad to see the little one has arrived safely on US soil.

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Space, Not Safe For Work

March 18, 2010 By

Astropixie has started a new post on her blog called Dirty Space News, inspired by a rather unfortunate-looking figure in a paper she was reading from astro-ph. There have been lots of contributions with more suggestively shaped figured and images. I wonder if Sarah Gallagher, the paper’s lead author, knows the new movement her last paper has sparked?

I spotted the poster shown above in our corridor – its designers have amazingly managed to make the XMM satellite look even more phallic than it already did…. I’m starting to think X-ray astronomers have had a lot of fun with this over the years.

Go check it out here and send her your own Dirty Space images!

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Dutch commit to Open Access

March 12, 2010 By

The Dutch science research council NWO has set up a 2.5 million euro fund (Dutch) to encourage its scientists to publish their work in open access journals. Under the scheme, any NWO grant holder can apply (English) for up to 5000 euro per project to pay open access publication charges. The incentive programme, which went live at the start of March, is a first step in the council’s broad commitment to open access in science.

In this interview (in Dutch) from November last year, NWO Chairman Jos Engelen, a particle physicist who was Chief Scientific Officer at CERN before taking over at NWO in 2009, indicates that the council may bring in an NIH-type public access policy for its grantholders later on this year. He suggests starting off with what he calls a “Swedish model”, whereby publications have to be made publicly available within 6 months of publication in an academic journal. This could then evolve towards a requirement that results from NWO-funded projects be published directly in open access journals only.

Engelen sounds like an excellent straight-talking Dutchman. He admits that right now there is a trade-off between impact and access, with many high-impact journals still charging for subscriptions – but that a natural consequence of NWO’s support for open access is to mirror this trade-off at the grant proposal level.

I was pleased to read about these developments, which reinforce my experience that the Dutch government has a very sensible and forward-thinking approach to funding science. I can’t find a timeline for implementation and hope these plans all get brought in swiftly.

There’s no deadline for applications to this new fund, money will be allocated to PIs on an ad hoc basis until the money runs out.

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Vote for your favourite Research Blogs

March 8, 2010 By

Following the Oscars news online reminded me that the voting for the Research Blogging Awards opened officially this week. Voting is only open to those registered with the site, but if you’re a blogger and you enjoy writing about peer-reviewed science, you should go sign up – immediately, if not sooner.

There are some great blogs up for awards and I will certainly cast my little vote in the categories where I have my favourites. This blog is a finalist in the category for Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy, so if you like what you read here from time to time, consider voting for me. As well as $50 I’d probably get some kind of badge to put in my sidebar, and I totally want one of those. I think it would look really nice next to the Dopplr duck. Help me fill that gaping hole in my sidebar y’all.

See the list of finalists here and follow the link in the invitation email to exercise your democratic rights. If you need reminding of the research I’ve written about in the last few months, here are all my posts tagged “researchblogging”.

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With a little help from our friends: Finding a home for E-ELT

March 4, 2010 By

Cerro Paranal (middle right) and Cerro Armazones (middle left)

ResearchBlogging.orgESO announced today that their Council have recommended Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Andes as the preferred site for their next generation optical/IR observatory, the 42-m European Extremely Large Telescope. The decision came in response to the delivery of a technical report by the organisation’s E-ELT Site Selection Advisory Committee, from which Armazones emerged as the frontrunner, “because it has the best balance of sky quality across all aspects and it can be operated in an integrated fashion with the existing ESO Paranal Observatory”.

So does this means the deal is done? Apparently not. The text also tells us that ESO have received proposals to host the telescope from both Spain, who would like to see the telescope site on La Palma, and Chile, so a final run-off between these two countries now seems likely.

What has struck me about this whole site selection exercise is the different approaches taken by ESO for the E-ELT and their North American counterparts, the Thirty Meter Telescope project.

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