BSDB Newsletter Spring 2019.pdf
The annual newsletter of the BSDB forms an essential summary of all that has happened over the previous year, including past and upcoming society meetings (articles 5 and 6), secretary and treasurer’s reports (articles 3 and 7), incoming committee members (article 4) and 2018 award winners (articles 11-14). At last year’s Spring meeting, a few members came to me to say how much they felt developmental biology was of great importance for the teaching of biological sciences. As an initial exploration into this issue, Bethan Clark has nicely summarized the opinions of previous Gurdon summer student awardees (article 15). Our Gurdon summer student program continues to go very well, with another set of exciting research projects that were undertaken last summer. Please take the time to have a look through their reports and see what they got up to this time around (article 16).
In this year’s AGM at the Spring meeting, we on opened a discussion around the subject of Open Access publishing. This is a highly pressing issue, as the cOAlitition S group are moving forward with PlanS to be implemented by 2020. Essentially, this will mean that researchers supported by specific funders (including the ERC, major research councils and the Wellcome Trust) will be required to publish only in entirely open access journals. For more on what this will mean for non-for-profit community journals such as those of the Company of Biologists, please see articles 8 and 9. One initiative that the Company of Biologists have launched to support the wider commenting of pre-prints is the PreLights platform, read more about this in article 10.
