A blog from the President, Professor Gordon Dougan FRS
Posted on October 7, 2025 by Professor Gordon Dougan FRS, President of the Microbiology Society
In his second blog, the Society’s President, Professor Gordon Dougan FRS, writes about the challenges facing science and scientists.
During the Covid pandemic I found time to write several blogs covering epidemic-related topics. As I have been President for a several months, I though now is a perfect time to write a few more to provide a channel of communication with you, our members. I will try to cover a range of topics in the next months that might be of general interest and promote discussion. These blogs will represent my own views and experiences.
We are currently living through uncertain times for science and scientists, with challenges coming from several directions. The Royal Society has commented on some of the main threats(1), and I will not repeat all these here. I have personally observed significant impacts in the global health space, where funding has been dropping off in crucial areas. Critical programmes including GAVI (vaccines) and PREPFAR (HIV therapy) are losing support through cuts and face a more uncertain future. Already we can anticipate a spike in the incidence of infections and clinical disease, including in relation to HIV and the vaccine preventable diseases of childhood. As a community, we need to carefully monitor the situation in the coming months, and providing well founded evidence of any changes in disease patterns will be crucial. Our members can play a part in this through modelling, epidemiology and working to support collaborators in those areas most effected.
I also know many of our members are feeling the impact of these funding challenges alongside an increasing workload. As a Society we need to be fully aware of this and provide support where we can. Even as an Emeritus, I see this at my own institute, the University of Cambridge, which is amongst the more privileged institutions. I have also seen these pressures during my voluntary teaching work at University Campus North Lincolnshire (UCNL) in Scunthorpe, where I have the wonderful opportunity to work with staff and students in a different setting. Throughout my career in industry and academia I have seen many changes and witnesses their impact, not always positive. Certainly, these times are as challenging as any I have experienced. I will return to some of these topics in later blogs.
I thought for this blog I would focus on publishing, particularly the peer reviewed journal space. As you likely know the Society currently publishes six scientific titles, with a new reviews journal, Microbiology Outlooks due to publish its first content in 2026 and others planned. We have become significantly dependent on this income and in a changing publishing market this is bringing financial pressures. Some of these pressures are linked to the recent laudable move towards Open Access publishing. This worthy cause has impacted our overall income, a factor that is compounded by funding cuts to libraries and other bodies that purchase our journals.
As a Society we need to navigate our way through this period. One way to raise more money in the current market is to publish more manuscripts (papers). We have a good idea of what that number might look like in the current financial setting. Another option is to open new markets, for example in Asia, where the Society has not been so prominent. Here, we would need reliable scientific and political links to build trust and profile. Unfortunately, the publishing market is far from settled, so we need to find the right path to stability through consistently reviewing our position, while sticking to an acceptable risk level. To be successful, we will need to keep our Trustees, editors, members and staff on board and informed. We are governed through a democratic structure that includes many unpaid volunteers taking on critical roles while under their own pressures. This means decision making is quite rightly open to challenge, so we need to manage ourselves carefully and constructively. This emerging funding gap will be a central focus for the senior management in the coming months.
At a personal level, I became an Editor of the then Journal of General Microbiology when I was a young lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, a role I kept on after moving into industry at the Wellcome Research Laboratories (now part of GSK). This was at a time of typed manuscripts, stencilled figures and posted communications. With little in the way of support, my filing cabinet and a good supply of stationary was my essential equipment. I was teaching around 100 hours a year at Trinity and running my first research group. I am not sure where the energy came from but at the time I viewed it as my part in serving the scientific community. Scientists are a rare breed that routinely take on unpaid work in a way that many other professions do not. It is important to note that editorial roles remain unpaid to this day.
In those days, one of the bonuses of being an Editor was that you could preview interesting papers well before they reached print (and I am talking months or a year ahead sometimes). I remember one day getting a paper to edit from the great H (Willy) Williams-Smith that was more like a book than a paper. Williams-Smith worked at several agricultural research institutes in the UK and was a pioneer in applying genetics to study microbial infections. The inventor of the term ‘Molecular Kochs Postulate’ Stanley Falkow was an admirer of Williams-Smith and based some of his approaches to research around Willy’s. The paper I edited covered the use of bacteriophage therapy to treat and prevent enteric bacterial diseases in farm animals. It still one of the best papers I have ever read and is still well worth a look at(2).
Throughout my career the Society has been close to my heart, having given my first ever public talk as a PhD student at a Society meeting. Consequently, I have consistently published in Society journals and have one paper currently under review. I always believed it was important to support the Society, as it played such a key role for microbiology (and science generally) in the UK and beyond. I still believe this is the case. The Society will go through good and not so good times, but it’s role in the current climate is vital.
As a not-for-profit publisher the Society must maintain quality while influencing practice in the field. As a Society and as members, we need to keep those who fund our work informed on the challenges we face, both as publishers and authors, as we move towards a world based on more open publishing. We are making plans to increase our activity in this regard this in the coming months.
We are privileged to have a group of outstanding and dedicated editors (including Editors-in-Chiefs, their deputies, their Editorial Boards and their reviewers). As volunteers they serve the field and quality assure and validate the work we publish. Many do this when they themselves are experiencing personal and professional pressures, as they establish or maintain their careers in a competitive environment. I sometimes wonder how they manage to do this. They set themselves goals to raise the impact of their journals and provide the very best service to their respective fields and topics. Again, as a not-for-profit organisation, their role is vital. They work together with our small but dedicated publishing team to get papers reviewed and out in a timely fashion. In a rapidly changing environment where electronic publishing, preprint platforms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are impacting, the job of the editor is no easy task.
We recently held a meeting at the Society headquarters with many of our Editors-in-Chiefs. One of the outcomes was to appoint the Chair of our Publishing panel, Professor Kim Hardie on to the Board of Trustees. Here the aim is to improve communication and connectivity within the Society, which is so dependent currently on publishing income. We encourage our editors and members to use this route to influence our direction of travel.
The publishing world is still very much in transition, and we will need to be innovative and flexible. We will look at how papers are reviewed and moved through to publishing. Can we simplify this without impacting quality? The peer reviewed paper is still a gold standard in science and a means of tracking accountability. However, other impact measurements such as hits on websites, data downloads and translational pathways are also now used in assessments. I saw these increase in importance during my time as Head of Pathogens at The Wellcome Sanger Institute and when working at Wellcome as Director of the Infection Challenge area. How do we exploit these better? What other areas can we improve in? Suggestions are always welcome.
Getting papers into higher impact journals is becoming increasingly difficult for smaller, university-based teams as referees demand more and more data that can only be delivered by huge teams or networks. In my early career getting papers published in those journals that were society supported or represented your discipline was a sign of achievement that matched impact factor. This was a common view at funding and assessment panels at the time, and I believe we should return to that position. As scientists we need to make sure that we continue to publish with integrity and with vigorous scientific appraisal. We cannot run scientific theory on opinion or as a media outlet.
On a final note, we should remind ourselves that science has never been more innovative with an enormous potential to do good. In microbiology, our work on epidemiology, vaccines and genomics served us well in the last pandemic. We need to be ready for the next one. We can use computing and AI to interrogate data in a way humans cannot do, often because of the sheer scale of the datasets. Stem cell biology is being used to create close-to-human infection models that can replace animal experiments and derisk the development path to drugs and vaccines. How can we help Investigators navigate their way through this complicated path to progress or even survive in the system? Perhaps we can provide training in some of these areas. The future can be bright if we provide support and create the right equitable environment.