About Ben Johnson
I trained as a virologist, starting with an undergraduate degree in virology from the University of Warwick, UK. My PhD, in influenza virus genetics and immunoevasion, was from Public Health England and the University of Reading, UK, with Maria Zambon and Wendy Barclay. My research interests then moved to smallpox vaccines, viral ion channels and cell adhesion, while a postdoc at Imperial College London with Geoffrey Smith, FRS. I then joined open-access publisher BioMed Central in 2011 as an editor and then associate publisher and was Head of Communities & Engagement at Springer Nature from 2016, running the Nature Research Communities and other online engagement activities for researchers. I joined Nature Medicine in 2021, with responsibility for news and opinion content, and am based in the London office.
Recent Comments
I loved this story, thank you for sharing it!
Thanks for sharing your latest research, Ros. You were one of our first ever community contributors, back in 2016, so it's so nice to see you writing for us again. Your bee pics are the best!
Sounds like a great meeting! I was at a recent Keystone meeting on human genomics where the excellent diversity and inclusion session was also during the lunch/skiing break. It's great that this issue is being discussed, but it should be part of the main programme!
Is the Harding typeface going to be available for non-Springer/Nature users? It looks absolutely wonderful, and I really, really want it. I love the tall x-height!
Thanks for your comment - we love Harding too! Sadly the Harding font is only for Nature-branded journals, but our creative designer was really pleased to hear the feedback.
Thanks for sharing this very personal story, Juliano.
Wow - what a story! I am especially impressed by your engagement with the local community - was this always part of the planned project or did it evolve over time?
Thank you so much for sharing this. I think this is one of the best posts on open access I’ve ever read!
I wish someone would have copy edited this commentary.
Thanks for your comment and thank you also to Zhengkui Zhou for writing this interesting post!
This is a community blog and we do not edit any posts on the site, as explained in our community policy. We ask all authors to write naturally, rather than in a house style, and publish over 100 such posts each month, and so inevitably spelling mistakes or grammatical errors are sometimes seen.
I hope that you found the content interesting, nonetheless.