The New Statesman has published the proceedings of a round table discussion  about the future direction of public libraries. I took part in the discussion hosted by the Smith Institute between 16 individuals including MPs, advisors, librarians, agency directors and representatives of various interest groups. As you would expect it was a lively discussion, but no one disagreed that libraries do need to adapt for the 21st century so that they continue to play a vital part in local communities and in our culture.

Meanwhile a perhaps even livelier debate around the Macmillan Science publishing model is currently taking place on the forum pages of our own Nature Network. Passions are running quite high in this discussion about the terms on which publishers and authors should engage in order to ensure maximum PR, marketing and sales of a book whilst giving the author a reasonable income and publishers a reasonable profit.