ABSTRACT
For people inclined to have faith in the day-to-day toil of scientists and the inexorable progress of scientific knowledge, these are unsettling times. This is not at all to say that a golden age of scientific progress is behind us or that scientists as a population are not quite what they used to be. But something has changed. The relatively recent explosion in the number of journal articles produced in most scientific fields of enquiry sits alongside a pervasive concern about the value of all this output. As I write, a spirited, bruising but ultimately vital international conversation about the quality of the work that researchers do is unfolding and, in turn, changing the way this work is done.
