[...] We had a very interesting meeting with Joann Roskoski, Deputy Assistant Director of Biological Sciences at the US National Science Foundation. We already have a number of joint programmes with the NSF, and it was most interesting to see the consonance of our thinking in areas such as sustainability, ‘big data’, open access and the like. In this regard, I read an interesting blog post on the extent to which (non-open-access) scientific journals help or hinder scientific progress, and another that involved blogging a thesis. [...] - Allyson Lister