In the third of a series of blog posts about the UCL Neuroscience Symposium 2012, held on Friday 29 June, Dr Andrea Alenda (UCL Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience) discusses a presentation by UKPubMed Central and the wider issue of open access research.

Access to research findings has, traditionally, largely been restricted to members of higher education institutions and related sectors that can afford the costs of subscriptions to a great number of journals.

With an average cost of £16,500 per year of journal subscription, not a single institution can afford the costs of subscribing to every existing journal.

For people outside these institutions, there is a paywall with a £20 pay-per-view fee per article to access peer-reviewed scientific research. The open access movement aims to remove these paywall barriers and make publicly funded research outputs freely available to everyone.

Open access hits the mainstream
Open Access has recently become a topic of mainstream interest, with the UK government showing their support by setting up a working group composed by members of academia, publishers and research funders to investigate expanding access to published research.

The findings of the group are contained in the recent Finch report. David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science, has indicated that the government backs the move to open access, saying: “We need to make as much as possible, as open as possible, as quickly as possible”.

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In the second of a series of blog posts about the UCL Neuroscience Symposium 2012, held on Friday 29 June, Ivan Alvarez Ferreira (UCL Institute of Child Health) and Joseph Jebelli (UCL Institute of Neurology) write about the presentations and topics that were their personal highlights.

Ivan:

For a long time, I have been fascinated by the visual system – that is, how do two eyes and a few billion neurons give rise to the richness of our visual conscious perception?

After a few years at university and deciding to take the plunge into graduate research, this question slowly evolved into how can we know the inner workings of the visual system? With this question in mind, I headed down to the symposium in search of an answer.

Neuroscience is a fundamentally interdisciplinary endeavour, from the petri dish experiment in microbiology to drug discovery for dementia, it spans multiple fields as well as multiple scales and sizes. For such a fundamental question, there are answers at every level.

Cells
Starting with the very small, I was captivated by a talk by Dr Tom Mrsic-Flogel (UCL Neuroscience, Physiology & Pharmacology) who began by showing this video of neurons firing in beautiful patterns while experiencing visual stimulation, such as watching a movie.

Intuitively, we might say that is all there is to it; a number of cells connected to each other and firing in regular patterns to encode what our eyes are perceiving. This raises an intriguing question: are these connections intrinsic, somehow built into our bodies? Or, is it a result of a free-for-all contest?

To answer this, Dr Mrsic-Flogel showed how we can track the development of neurons in the visual cortex of mice, revealing that signals from our eyes seem to follow pre-determined paths to specific neurons in the brain. But how these neurons wire with each other is relatively variable in comparison.

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In the first of a series of blog posts about the UCL Neuroscience Symposium 2012, held on Friday 29 June, Post-doctoral Research Scientists Fiona Kerr and Oyinkan Adesakin (UCL Institute of Healthy Ageing and UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment) give a brief overview of the day in words and video, including their personal highlights.

We have both studied Alzheimer’s disease at UCL for several years but this, unbelievably, was our first time attending the annual UCL Neuroscience Symposium.

Upon popular recommendation from our colleagues as an interesting, inspiring and friendly meeting covering all aspects of neuroscience, the symposium certainly lived up to its reputation.

Speakers included experienced scientists as well as up-and-coming researchers, with seminars providing an interesting mix of current research within the historical context of the neuroscience field. Posters covered a wide-range of subjects – from how nerve cells function to diseases of the nervous system – with joint lab posters providing a good opportunity to find collaborators within the university.

Attracting over 800 attendees, including UCL scientists, neuroscience editors and commercial companies, this event underlined the powerhouse of research within neuroscience  at UCL.

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Annette Mitchell,  PhD student (UCL Greek & Latin)

Linking neuroscience and the ancient Olympics appears curious at first sight, but after hearing Professor Semir Zeki (UCL Neuroesthetics) express how neuroscience can illuminate ideological elements of the ancient Olympics these differing subjects proved to be a stimulating pairing.

The setting was a discussion on 28 June between Professor Zeki and Professor Chris Carey (UCL Greek and Latin) entitled The pursuit of Olympic ideals – physical, neural and aesthetic. Professor Zeki asked Professor Carey about aspects related to the ancient Olympics and concluded by providing neuro-anatomical explanations for them.

The Original Olympics
Professor Carey began by introducing the ancient Olympics, which is commonly believed to have first occurred in 776 BC. The Games were likely instituted so that the various ancient Greek city-states, which were often at war, could peacefully compete. The Olympic Games were, essentially, sublimated aggressive impulses.

Olympic competitors were, indeed, ruthless. In the pancrateon – a wrestling competition – any move, however harmful, was tolerated, provided it did not kill an opponent, which was “frowned upon”.

Athletics undergirded by aggression became part of the fabric of Greek culture. Indeed, everywhere the Greeks subsequently founded cites there were always wrestling arenas and gymnasiums (sporting grounds).

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