Chris Armbuster quotes Robert Merton, the respected sociologist of science (and incidentally the inventor of the focus group) in his most recent post. Merton famously proposed a number of norms for scientific discourse: *Universalism: new work is assessed by universal impersonal criteria *Communality: scientific knowledge should be common property *Disinterestedness: prime concern is the advancement of knowledge *Organized scepticism: knowledge should be continually subjected to critical scrutiny These fairly accurately reflect the belief sets common in grand old establishment scientists of Merton's day and possibly today. Unfortunately they do not reflect actual scholarly behaviour, then or now. The data for this are very numerous and correspond to the "I-thou" problem in the dichotomies of author-reader behaviour: for example, "I as a reader want to see your raw data and lab books" yet the same person as an author is most unwilling to do this until the potential for publications and credit has been exhausted (thereby breaking two of the Norms already). Researchers may say they believe in Merton's Norms but don't act like it. An exercise I set for my graduate students is to read James Watson's The Double Helix and try to find examples of any of Merton's Norms being exemplified by Watson, Crick or their colleagues and collaborators. We are only as good as the last set of data, and unfortunately Merton's otherwise excellent writings do not always stand up to this test. Best Michael A Mabe (with my scientometrics hat on) Chief Executive Officer International Association of STM Publishers E-mail: mabe@stm-assoc.org Web: www.stm-assoc.org