A common problem that many researchers face when working in a second language is uncertainty about how to write a service request (see "Offers & Requests" in main menu) in the second language. 

Authors may be uncomfortable making a request for help public, and not being sure of how to express the request is likely increase the discomfort. This leads to a natural resistance to make public requests for help.

This is why it is important for editors and translators to make public offers of help, so that authors can find them easily and then contact them using our "private note" messaging system. After login, each member can find the "private note" tab under their own username in the main menu.

It may also be useful for our network to provide individuals support in composing requests for help. I can offer such support as Administrator, but only to a limited extent as I have a full-time research job that needs most of my time.

What our network really needs is a volunteer support team who can help authors compose requests for help for either the public "Offers & Requests" or for private notes that can be sent to specific editors or translators in our network (or other service providers in the network - proofreaderes, illustrators, etc.)

If you would like be part of such a volunteer support team, please let me know!

Dear Members (newly-joined), I am the creator and administrator of the Research Cooperative.  This means I am looking at the signup details of every new member, and making sure that real people are joining the network. So I am sure that this message is reaching real people! Please do not ignore the Research Cooperative after joining!  This is my main advice.  The practical value of our network depends on each member completing a public profile, and then using the forums at least occasionally. Our goal is NOT to become another global, personal-data-grabbing network. Fear not. Our goal is to support a large and active community of people interested in education, research, and the practical aspects of scientific communication and publishing.  Please have the confidence to ask for help or to offer help.  The best way for young researchers to learn about scientific writing is to help others, and also to learn from professional editors or translators, and from the comments of reviewers.  Paying for help from a professional editor or translator is also a good way to learn how to write better, and is a worthwhile investment. If this leads to a manuscript being accepted for review by a good journal, then much can be learned from the reviewers who help to make that journal good.  Having feedback from good reviewers, and acting on that feedback, is much more useful than having a paper uncritically accepted by a journal that has few readers. Experienced, professional editors and translators are strongly encouraged to promote their services through our network.  Inexperienced editors and translators are also strongly encouraged to raise their hands, and gain experience through our network.  These are all matters that can and should be discussed by our members in the various forums of the Research Cooperative. The opportunities and issues for communication in different subject areas, countries, and journals are very diverse. Finally, I would be grateful if new members can tell me anything at all about their impressions of the network, the general ease of use, specific problems with navigation, and any other issues.  All feedback is welcome. Sincerely, Peter Matthews (Kyoto, Japan) [Posted 7th April to 405 newly-joined members of our network]

Recently I began putting a slogan header on the Services top page where all the service offers and requests are shown.

The aim is to change this whenever the existing slogan looks tired or badly chosen.

Today's new slogan is:

"Good communication needs authors who care about their readers. Please ask here for help, or offer help"

Suggestions for a better slogan are welcome, preferably something original.

Update (5th July 2018): current slogan is "Services for authors who care about their readers: Ask here for help or offer help!"

The title here is an expansion of the catch phrase of a Stanford University team that developed a system (program) for long-term preservation of digital content: LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) .

The program description begins:

'The LOCKSS Program is an open-source, library-led digital preservation system built on the principle that “lots of copies keep stuff safe.” The LOCKSS system is the first and only mechanism to apply the traditional purchase-and-own library model to electronic materials. The LOCKSS system allows librarians at each institution to take custody of and preserve access to the e-content to which they subscribe, restoring the print purchase model with which librarians are familiar. ...' (Internet 10th June 2017, lockss.org/about/what-is-lockss/)

This program has supported a range of public and private archiving efforts, with a particular emphasis on helping libraries maintain access to digital content that they have purchased. What happens when an online journal dies and the website disappears? If libraries can keep copies of the digital content they actually already paid for, then the journal's published information will remain accessible.

There is a wealth of useful information and discussion in the LOCKSS website itself, and especially in Dr. David S. H. Rosenthal's Blog , maintained by one of the founders of LOCKSS.

One of the many important efforts being made using LOCKSS is called CLOCKKS :

' Controlled  LOCKSS is a not-for-profit joint venture between the world’s leading academic publishers and research libraries whose mission is to build a sustainable, geographically distributed dark archive with which to ensure the long-term survival of Web-based scholarly publications for the benefit of the greater global research community.

CLOCKSS is for the entire world's benefit. Content no longer available from any publisher ("triggered content") is available for free. CLOCKSS uniquely assigns this abandoned and orphaned content a Creative Commons license to ensure it remains available forever.' ( Internet 10th June 2017 ,   https://clockss.org/clockss/Home)

My Japanese wife reads two newspapers per day but claims it is just one, with morning and evening editions. She's a subscriber and reader. She has a photographic memory. I'm a non-subscriber and a clipper.

To be precise, I am a newsclipping addict. For environmental reasons!

Clipping helps me to remember things. I forget what exactly, but surely it does. Or at least, I know that I have already seen a paper if I find holes in it.

I've made a pact that I should not buy my next paper until I've finished clipping what catches my eye from the previous paper next to my chair at our dining table. I'm systematic, each page checked for clipworthy news is folded and put onto the paper recycling pile. A huge pile of paper in the corner of our living room.

We all read newspapers at the table, most often during breakfast. This includes my son. It is rude and unsociable but when else are we going to get time to read the paper? My son has all day (he lives at home, the newspaper is his university, along with the internet). My wife and I have only minutes free, squeezed into busy work schedules.

Clipworthy means I want to read the article twice. Or see it again in twenty years. Maybe use it for teaching. Maybe write about it. Maybe dream about it. Maybe see a new direction for my research, or change my life because of it.

I always think that another PhD lives in the questions raised by a good piece of news writing. I have hundreds of possible PhD topics stashed away in my paper files, waiting for the students I will never have. Waiting for second lives and further reincarnations for which I have every hope but no reasonable expectation. One life seems lucky enough, a sparkling moment at the surface of a broad and continuous stream.

Perhaps that is the miracle of news. We can live many lives through the stories we read. Good news means news that has meaning, significance, resonance. It sparkles, or makes me miserable, drowns my spirit -- but I cannot turn down the chance to learn from something that catches my eye or mind or heart. Or stomach. From past experience, I trust my gut reactions. Sometimes I clip first, and then later understand why I did that.

Really bad news is a nightmare that I try to forget. I don't need to know everything about problems that I cannot do anything about. There are enough unhappy and happy stories that I should look at. They concern matters close to my own life and work. Agriculture, food security, pest and disease in the food chain, arable land loss, global fertiliser supplies, poverty, over-population, food trade, small-scale farming, artists, writers, farmers, plants, or animals.

I may be a wide-grazing, newsclipping addict, but that doesn't mean I don't have focus.

The news is a lens. The optics may be fuzzy at times, but newspapers do give me a deeper, wider perspective on what I am doing with the rest of my day. I like taking what comes, sorting out the wheat from the chaff, finding unexpected gems. What will the next turn of the page bring?

The news is a drug. Clipping the news is a daily addiction, accompanied by sounds of family, rain, frogs chirping in the fields outside, passing trains, another cup of tea. Followed by a dash to the station, with ideas to think about as I study the space between my nose and the next passenger.

Today, after reviewing the "Centennial Memorial Issue" of The Journal of Japanese Botany , I've set myself a challenge: locating 100 journals that have published centennial issues, at any time, and through them: 

10,000+ years of scientific learning

Here is the start of my list (IJf=International Journal for, Jo=Journal of, JoT=Journal of The, Pot=Proceedings of the, T=The, TJo=The Journal of, QJo=Quarterly Journal of).

Using "centennial issue" and "journal" as key words, I could reach 4,000 years in one night ( 10th March 2017). So far, there is a clear American (and English-language) bias in the results obtained.

I will add more titles as opportunity permits. Please comment with any additions you can suggest for this!

1. Accountancy, Jo
2. Advanced Materials
3. American Bar Association Journal
4. American Educational Research Journal
5. American Journal of Epidemiology
6. American Journal of Medicine
7. American Political Science Review
8. Applied Psychology, Jo
9. Audio Engineering Society, JoT
   
10. Audiology
11. Astrophysical Journal, T
12. California Fish and Game
13. Catholic Historical Review, T
14. Dairy Science, Jo
15. Economic Journal
16. Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal
17. FASEB Journal (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology)
18. Harvard Public Health Magazine
19. Indian Institute of Science, Jot
    
    
20. Institute of Radio Engineers, Pot (now IEEE, Pot )
21. Japanese Botany, TJo
22. Mathematical Sciences of the University of Tokyo, Jo ( Kodaira )
    
23. Melanie Klein and Object Relations, Jo
24. Micromechanics and Molecular Physics, Jo
    
25. Parasitology, IJf
26. Phoenix Business Journal, T
    
27. Physical Chemistry, TJo
28. Philippine Law Journal, T
    
29. Political Economy, TJo
30. Psychological Review
31. Quadrant
32. Radiology
33. Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Jo
34. Review of Research in Education Journal
35. Rhode Island Medical Journal
36. Speculative Philosophy, Jo
37. Speech, QJo
38. Tennessee State University, TJo
    
39. Tohoku Mathematical Journal
40. Tribology, Jo

Nicholas P. Money (2002) Mr Bloomfield's Orchard: The mysterious world of mushrooms, molds, and mycologists. Oxford University Press: New York.

This is a book that anyone with an interest in biology can enjoy. I came to the book as a botanist who has been gradually becoming aware of the possible complexity of interactions between the crop I study, insects, and fungii. I needed a basic and relatively recent overview of how fungii behave in the world, and this book proved to be a good choice.

My concern is with Phytopthora colocasiae, a leaf blight disease on taro (Colocasia esculenta). Phytopthora infestans, the cause of potato blight, is introduced near the end of the book. It is famous for contributing to the Irish Famine of 1845 (the other contribution came from land, tax and trade policies that did not take into account that a starved and jobless population cannot simply purchase the food it needs: supply cannot meet demand when those in need have no capital. Phytopthora blew in on the wind, and the Irish blew out on sailing ships. One diaspora generated a second.

Money writes in an easy-to-read style that is based on long experience of explaining complex life cycles to university students. The humour used to lighten the reading is sometimes more than needed, but is usually pulled back just in time to reach the serious crux of each topic. The orchard of the title was located in the author's home village in Oxfordshire, UK. It was where he first encountered fungii in large quantities, on rotting fruit. It seems he did not immediately take to fungii, but rather found them a second time through a teacher at university.

My own research trajectory is a little similar - I first ecountered taro, a Pacific crop, growing wild next to a derelict whaling station in northern New Zealand, during a family camping trip. My academic interest did not develop until I met teachers who were passionate about the study of deep history - archaeologists of the Pacific. In this region, taro arrived early, as a crop introduced from island to island. The disease followed centuries later, in the 20th century, spreading out from somewhere in Southeast Asia. After reading a book written by a passionate mycologist, my interest in Phytopthora colocasiae has grown.

It is unlikely that I can help stop the present spread of this disease, but I might learn something useful if I keep my eyes open while studying wild populations of the host plant. And my host plant in its natural habitat might even be a good place to look for fungii that have not been seen before.

It seems that any microcosm that has not already been visited by myocologists is likely to reveal new forms of fungal life. Although most fungii are inconspicuous, they are not insignificant - they play an outsized role in wider ecology of life on Earth.

Sanjeev Sanyal  (2016)  The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History, Penguin (297 pp. incl. index).

I found the book in December last year in a great bookshop hidden away on an upper floor of an Indian cottage crafts emporium in New Delhi. Sanyal, an Oxford-trained economist, takes us deep into the prehistory, human migrations, and social upheavals of all regions that lie around or near the Indian Ocean, from our human evolutionary past to modern economic present.

The Ocean of Churn is an expansive journey across time and space, informed by the author's own footwork in many of the places he writes about. The Indian continent is geologically and socially central to the story. Although the author is himself Indian, and is very interested in India's position in world history, he provides a refeshingly frank and balanced view of all the characters in his narrative, in India and beyond.

Sanyal has pulled many diverse subjects into a single coherent, readable narrative that expresses sympathy for ordinary people, admiration for the achievements of extraordinary people, and shows how ordinary people can often be seen as extraordinary when we look back in time.

An implication of all this is that our "ordinary" today would certainly be extraordinary to people in the past. The fact that "ordinary" readers from almost anywhere in the world might chance to read this book review is one example.

A larger purpose of Sanyal's writing may be to help people today understand that human movements and social interractions have been complex and wide-ranging for many thousands of years. His hope, I imagine, is that we can continue adapting to ever-changing circumstances without resorting to the kinds of greed, violence and short-sighted planning that have characterised so many human endeavours in the past.

In this journey around the Indian Ocean, the author introduces the best and worst traits of human nature, and suggests how we may all have significant roles to play in human history -- even if our lives are never recorded in stone memorials that will in any case be buried in the detritus of later ages.