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Star formation in Gould's Belt
Last week a big conference took place at the European Space Agency hub ESTEC, down the road in Noordwijk. The town was inundated with the lucky scientists who got to play with the first data from the new infrared space observatory Herschel and were finally allowed to talk about it to the rest of the world. And now that the conference is over, as expected, science from Herschel is everywhere!
Click formega-high-res version on Dumpert… It might be the last day of chemtrail-less skies, let’s enjoy the view.
Quick update from the frontlines of judicial excellence. As expected, nurse Lucia de Berk was cleared of all murder charges by the court of Arnhem on 14 April last week. The case has been extensively covered in the Dutch media, with some frank editorials, most of which are sadly hiding behind a paywall. The Haga Hospital, which owns the Juliana Children’s Hospital where Lucia worked at the time of her arrest, will pay her 45,000 euro in compensation for wrongfully firing her. While that’s a decent amount of money, given that the hospital’s own apparently shabby internal investigation led to her arrest in the first place, I think it’s a pretty measly gesture. The hospital’s own statement is very brief and terse.
Everyone’s been falling over each other to apologise to Lucia for this awful miscarriage of justice – Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin, Harm Brouwer, Chairman of the Public Prosecution – and apparently negotiations on what compensation she will receive from the government are ongoing.
As usual the best coverage comes from GeenStijl, the Netherlands’ answer to The Onion, who report that Lucia has signed up to star in Kafka: The Musical. If you know Dutch, go read.
Here’s a short news report in Dutch from NOS:
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1. Why are the Lorentz Center advertising for Viktor & Rolf? Are they sponsoring this workshop? That would be awesome. But unlikely.
2. There is no need for high-heeled clogs. Ever. If you are in any doubt as to how hideous these things are, watch the fashion show here (although having lighting rigs mounted on their shoulders can’t have helped with the models’ comfort).
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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