Substantia. An International Journal of the History of Chemistry 5(2): 5-6, 2021 Firenze University Press www.fupress.com/substantia ISSN 2532-3997 (online) | DOI: 10.36253/Substantia-1383 Our Short Talks Pierandrea Lo Nostro Department of Chemistry “Ugo Schiff ”, University of Florence, Italy E-mail: pierandrea.lonostro@unifi.it We recently organized the first edition of Substantia Short Talks to discuss some hot topics within the com- munity of our journal. It was a recorded online event, that took place online on July 1, 2021, at 4 pm CEST. In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic that forced us to restrain or limit our social and cultural activ- ities, we thought to offer a lively cultural happening to strengthen our interactions and to ponder on some remarkable issues that affect our lives as scientists and citizens in a globalized world. Examples that came up to our minds were quite some. Just to mention a few: the protection of intellectu- al property and the worldwide distribution of life-saving drugs (e.g. the anti-Covid vaccines) at very low costs; the relationship between science and politics, i.e. Black Lives Matter and the harsh debate between some international scientific journals and publishers; or the denial of free- dom and democracy and even the lack of scientific dis- semination in some countries, and so forth. Not to speak about the side effects of the frenzied race to publish and the slavery to bibliometric indicators. What are the most important forces that drive research and dissemination in science today? And what can we do to improve the state of the communication between the society and scientists? What does the pandemic have to say in this respect? These are only a few among the several questions that spring from our minds. And their echo often reverberate in Substantia as key points of some articles. These are the reasons why we decided to organize these “short talks” as a parallel contribution to our efforts to make science more transparent. This time our event features three contributions on peer review, big science and on the most advanced outcomes of current studies carried out by a young researcher in a specific field of Chemistry. Each contribution lasted 20 minutes, leaving room for questions and answers. We began with Seth Rasmussen from North Dako- ta State University in Fargo, who spoke about “The good and the bad of peer review”. Peer review started in 1831 in the UK with Willian Whewell who proposed to receive the comments of two fellows of the Royal Society on submissions to the Philo- sophical Transactions. Peer review truly is the central core of scientific publishing. It is necessary to guarantee the reliability of a paper, in the scientific community but also before the society. This process is the real core for the publication, of a reliable, solid and trustable article. Interestingly, not so many people know that there are different kinds of peer review: single blind, double blind, post-publication, open, transparent, and collabo- rative peer review.1 Sometimes the process is rough, for different rea- sons, and the editorial staff has to handle this crucial and delicate step very carefully. In any case this is by far the most important stage in the publication process. Then it was the turn of Helge Kragh, from the Niels Bohr Institutet in Copenhagen. He gave an historical overview on “Big Science: Opportunities and Challeng- es”. This is a key issue with strong political ramifica- tions. In fact big projects are so expensive that only gov- ernmental agencies can provide the necessary financial sources. They may also include other non scientific roles, such as managers, technicians, officers, secretaries, pub- lic accountants, and so forth. The work is usually car- ried out in a centralized system of large scale facilities http://www.fupress.com/substantia 6 Pierandrea Lo Nostro where big and sophisticated, very expensive machines are employed, for example particle accelerators (CERN in Europe) or neutron sources (ORNL in the US). The term “big science” was introduced by Der- ek J. De Solla Price, in a 1963 book that presented an overview of the 1962 Brookhaven National Laboratory Pegram Lectures.2 Certainly the topics and questions addressed in big projects are of paramount importance for science and for the society, however some significant draw- backs exist. For example the incredibly huge number of co-authors,3,4 sometimes larger than 5,000! This fact has important negative consequences, for example the impossibility to establish each author’s credits (who did what), practical problems (e.g. answering the review- ers), and ethical issues. Of course when such a gigan- tic amount of money is invested, labs and instruments must work full time, with the consequence that meth- odologies and techniques may take the advantage over topics and science. The third contribution was from Andreas Lesch, a young electrochemist working at the University of Bologna. His presentation “Electrochemical detection of viable bacteria and biofilms” addressed some hot top- ics, particularly in view of the next pandemic that some expect will be due to antibiotics resistance in patho- gens,5 and of controlling the growth of biofilms on all kinds of surfaces. Electrochemistry concepts and techniques can be very useful in the detection of viable bacteria, particu- larly when time is a key issue for establishing the correct therapy. The main conclusions of the presentation were the production of flexible and reproducible electrodes through inkjet printing,6 their application to detect via- ble bacteria,7 and the opportunities given by scanning electrochemical microscopies for investigating biofilms.8 In line with Substantia’s vision and scopes this talk on the most recent advances in research in this particu- lar field, was combined with the two previous contribu- tions that do deal with current science activities but in another way. This attitude of the journal springs from our inter- and multidisciplinary interests. Today science is deeply divided, there are only few chances to exchange high level information between scientists working in different fields. In other words, the unification of knowledge is a fantasy, due to the over-specialization and to the reluctance to make con- tents and concepts easily available to other scientists. It is not a question of science popularization, it is a ques- tion of sharing. And of promoting truly interdisciplinary studies. NOTES 1. https://authorservices.wiley.com/Reviewers/journal- reviewers/what-is-peer-review/types-of-peer-review. html 2. De Solla Price, D.J. Little Science, Big Science. 1963. New York: Columbia University Press. 3. Aad, G. et al. Combined Measurement of the Higgs Boson Mass in pp Collisions at = 7 and 8 TeV with the ATLAS and CMS Experiments. Phys. Rev. Lett. 2015, 114, 191803. 4. CMS Collaboration., LHCb Collaboration. Observa- tion of the rare  Bs0  →µ+µ−  decay from the combined analysis of CMS and LHCb data. Nature 2015, 522, 68–72. 5. Nadimpalli, M.L.; Chan, C.W.; Doron, S. Antibiotic resistance: a call to action to prevent the next epi- demic of inequality. Nat. Med. 2021, 27, 187–188. 6. Zhu, Y.; Jović, M.; Lesch, A.; Tissières Lovey, L.; Prudent, M.; Pick, H.; Girault, H.H. Immuno-affin- ity Amperometric Detection of Bacterial Infections. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2018, 57, 14942-14946. 7. Nagar, B.; Jović, M.; Costa Bassetto, V.; Zhu, Y.; Pick, H.; Gómez-Romero, P.; Merkoçi, A.; Girault, H.H.; Lesch, A. Highly Loaded Mildly Edge-Oxidized Gra- phene Nanosheet Dispersions for Large-Scale Inkjet Printing of Electrochemical Sensors. ChemElectro- Chem 2020, 7, 460-468. 8. Darvishi, S.; Pick, H.; Oveisi, E.; Girault, H.H.; Lesch, A. Highly Loaded Mildly Edge-Oxidized Gra- phene Nanosheet Dispersions for Large-Scale Inkjet Printing of Electrochemical Sensors. Sensors & Actu- ators: B. Chemical 2021, 334, 129669. Substantia An International Journal of the History of Chemistry Vol. 5, n. 2 - 2021 Firenze University Press Our Short Talks Dante Alighieri Science Communicator Gian Italo Bischi Spin Temperature and Dynamic Nuclear Polarization. From the History of Researches (1949–1983) Alexander Kessenikh Can non-recyclable plastic waste be made environmentally sustainable? Luigi Campanella1, Giuseppe B. Suffritti2 Translations of Roscoe’s Chemistry Books into Japanese and Hebrew - Historical, Cultural and Linguistic Aspects Yona Siderer First Steps: Synthetic Ammonia in the United States Anthony S. Travis The «D.I. Mendeleev’s Periodic System of the Elements» Mural Near the Mendeleev Institute for Metrology in Saint Petersburg: How Metrologists Celebrated the 100th Anniversary of the Scientist Elena Ginak The Revolution in Science in America, 1900-1950 Jack S. Cohen Capillary Electrophoresis and its Basic Principles in Historical Retrospect. Part 2. Electrophoresis of Ions: the Period from its Discovery in 1800 till Faraday’s Lines of Electric Force in the 1840s. Ernst Kenndler Disinfectants: Use of Different Types of Sanitization Techniques in 18th and 19th Centuries Britain and India Chetan A Brief History of Oil Refining Rafael Larraz Albert Ladenburg (1842-1911) – The Distinguished German Chemist and Historian of Chemistry of the Second Half of the XIX Century (To the 110th Anniversary of His Death) Aleksander Sztejnberg Review of “Ethics of Chemistry: From Poison Gas to Climate Engineering” by Joachim Schummer & Tom Børsen, eds. World Scientific Publishing, Singapore, 2021 Apostolos K. Gerontas