Too hot to handle

If any of you have been wondering why commenting on Nature’s NewsBlog concerning PLoS’s finances came to an abrupt halt recently we now have an explanation.

As you know Nature wrote a story last week about our finances “Open-access journal hits rocky times“. We have posted our response on this blog but it also produced a fairly large number of comments on Nature’s NewsBlog, all highly supportive of us I might say and not a little critical of the stance of the original story. Comment’s have also been made on the reporter, Declan Butler’s personal blog. Thank you so much to everyone who has voiced their support for what we are trying to acheive.

Anyway, things fell silent at Nature a few days ago, but not because people no longer had anything to say. Rather comments submitted by such Open Access luminaries as Jan Veltrop and Heather Morrison weren’t getting posted. Steven Harnard even went as far as to post the same comment twice but it never appeared, so he eventually blogged it elsewhere.

Apparently there was a fire near the King’s Cross offices of Nature on Monday involving a building containing gas cannisters. The whole area was evacuated including Kings Cross Railway Station and the Nature offices. They have only just been allowed back according to another Nature blog, the sceptical chymist [sic].

Michael Hopkin explains: Apologies for the delay in your comments appearing on this thread. Nature staff have been excluded from the office for the past few days due to a fire in the adjacent premises. As you can see in the notes on posting, comments are reviewed by staff before being posted (for relevance, not specific content), and this process has been hit by the events of the past few days. Please rest assured that Nature is not censoring this blog!

The thought had never crossed my mind. Still, given that some of the comments that have only just been posted were submitted on Friday evening it shows what a backlog they must have yet to clear. Let’s hope that they don’t lose anything.

p.s. I hope that readers will appreciate how hard it was for me to write this entry without once suggesting that it must be around end of term time at Hogwart’s School at the moment and that an industrial fire would make a great cover for some violent incident on platform 9 3/4!