DEMOS

The Council for Science Editors, who are behind the most important scientific journals, are publishing a bunch of special issues, editorials and research reports related to global poverty and development challenges.

Next week, we will be holding a workshop aiming to make a small contribution to a small area of science, bringing together those interested in developing world issues with those interested in nanotechnology. One of the speakers will be Richard Jones, whose excellent blog discusses the journals' efforts.

There are all sorts of interesting articles, including one by Thembela Hillie, a South African nanoscientist I met last year in Pretoria. But it is also interesting that the journals have chosen not to hide these papers. They are all deemed sufficiently publicly interesting to be made open access. For the world's most powerful science publishers, this is no small gesture. See here for a previous rant about open access.

This comes at the same time as an interesting survey, brought my way by the ever-excellent Will Davies, showing that France lead the way in pointing their innovation policies towards developing world needs. Will makes the point that this undermines the lazy assumption that policy for innovation should just be about making it happen. When we look at the direction of innovation, on this scorecard, the UK looks pretty ropey.

All of this is a nice reminder that the status quo in scientific practice and communication is in no sense inevitable. There is real room to ask new questions of science, to bring in new values and unearth new value. One of the tasks of the next phase of our Atlas of Ideas project is to test this idea with some new national innovation systems.