Position Statements

The Biochemical Society is concerned at the growing rate of antimicrobial resistance, and believes that sustained research funding is needed to drive the development of rapid diagnostics, and new antimicrobials and alternative approaches to combating infection.

As part of our involvement with the Drug Discovery Pathways Group, we have outlined the biochemistry skills that have a critical impact on modern drug discovery, highlighting important areas for training and skills development.

The Biochemical Society is committed to ensuring equal opportunities in the molecular biosciences, and we believe that a lack of diversity across the scientific community represents a loss of potential talent to the UK.

The Biochemical Society recognises the advantages of harnessing genetic modification for the improvement of crops, feed and food to contribute to global food security. We support the use of molecular biology for targeted and precise crop improvement alongside maintenance of regulatory control, and recognise our responsibility in fully evaluating these technologies and deploying them where appropriate.

The Biochemical Society and Portland Press support open scholarship and are committed to transitioning to open scholarship across its activities.

Our open scholarship position statement builds on our open science position statement from 2018, which can be read here.

The Biochemical Society recognises there is a need to improve the ways in which the output of scientific research is evaluated, and encourages a move away from reliance on the Journal Impact Factor.

We have signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, which lays out a set of recommendations to improve research assessment and is aimed at funding agencies, institutions, publishers, researchers and organisations that supply metrics to assess research outputs.