From the blogosphere

Manners in the blogosphere -- 24 July 2008

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:26:50 -0000

Blogosphere etiquette comes into question. “We seem to be at a critical juncture concerning the intersection of blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies with science,” writes associate editor Noah Gray at Action Potential, the Nature Neuroscience blog.
The anonymity of cyberspace provides protection to both share honest opinions and participate in mud-slinging without repercussion, he notes. Yet interaction on the Internet is more personal. “So why should some choose to check their manners at the door before logging on?” He argues that intolerant online communities unwilling to engage in a civil debate — whether on publication business models or the role of glutamate receptors in long-term potentiation of neurons — will turn off would-be contributors and stunt the growth of online scientific collaboration. Web-based collaborative technologies will not work for science if they become dominated by exclusive, aggressive types.
Gray isn’t calling for “communal singing of Kum Ba Yah during scientific debates”, but simply a certain level of restraint and professionalism online.
Nature 454, x; 24 July 2008

Handling huge datasets - 17 July 2008 (reposted)*

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 07:54:15 -0000

“How do you handle terabytes of data?” asks Nature Methods’ Chief Editor Veronique Kiermer at Methagora, the journal’s blog. That, she says, “is a question that more and more investigators must face, on a weekly basis” — and is also the topic of the journal’s July Editorial (Nature Methods 5, 577; 2008).
Kiermer notes that a single experimental run of light-sheet fluorescence microscopy can generate so much raw data that handling and storage become a challenge. The ‘1000 Genomes’ project asks participants to save raw sequencing data in public archives that are being developed in the United States and Europe.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for the raw data challenge. The solutions depend on the number of users, the fraction of the experimental cost that data storage represents and the intrinsic value of raw data compared with processed data. Even within one technology, these parameters evolve with time and vary with applications. But, the Editorial notes, “saving only processed data is not recommended for any field”.
Nature 454, viii; 17 July 2008

*Owing to a technical error, the wrong entry for the 17 July Blogosphere was previously posted. This post is the correct one.

Data and the scientific method -- 10 July 2008

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:14:37 -0000

With the provocative title “The end of theory”, an essay in Wired magazine on 23 June argues that, with the advent of huge datasets and Google-like algorithms, the scientific method has become obsolete.
Inevitably, this view has stimulated responses in the scientific blogosphere, not least on Nature Network, where David Basanta of the University of Dundee, UK, points out in his blog that models are “more than predictive machines” and that science involves true understanding, not just prediction.
Another Nature Network blogger, Bob O’Hara of the University of Helsinki, says that “10 million observations on 6 samples is still only information about 6 samples.” The quality of data is important, as well as the quantity.
Basanta’s question “Does any one else think that traditional science is a thing of the past and that cloud computing will drive us modelers to the employment office?” is answered by Nature Network users with a resounding “no”.
Nature 454, x; 10 July 2008

Misconduct survey stirs the pot -- 3 July 2008

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:29:09 -0000

An Editorial and Commentary in the 19 June issue of Nature (Nature 453, 957; 2008 and Nature 453, 980–982; 2008) are hotly debated at Nature Network’s News and Opinion forum. In the Commentary, Sandra Titus, director of intramural research at the US Office of Research Integrity, and her colleagues report a survey indicating as many as a thousand unreported instances of misconduct a year.
Could better policies stem this seeming flood? Lynn Howard Ehrle of the Organic Consumers Association writes of the “Faustian pact” in which many university presidents and deans have “accepted posts on corporate boards of directors where they have a primary legal fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders that is in conflict with the mission of the university, their students and patients”.
Other forum participants provide heartfelt personal evidence to support the Nature Editorial’s view that “misconduct investigations all too often focus solely on an individual offender, and fail to diagnose the environment that has allowed the misconduct to flourish”.
Nature 454, xi; 3 July 2008

Downloads as publication metric -- 26 June 2008

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:31:24 -0000

The citations-versus-downloads conversation continues. Nature Neuroscience’s editors have analysed the number of downloads a paper receives immediately after its appearance online, and find a high correlation with its citation frequency years after publication. Associate editor Noah Gray provides the details at the journal’s blog, Action Potential.
Despite well-known concerns about impact factors, he notes, “these numbers are typically used to rate the importance or prominence of a particular journal, and thus by proxy, the importance of the individual papers published within”. This flawed association often leads individuals and organizations to equate the total number of citations with scientific impact.
Instead, the editors wanted to measure readership of an article that would reflect its levels of outside interest and perceived value. Although the “number of downloads” measure is subject to misuse and has its own flaws, it provides a piece of an alternative solution for a more informative picture of manuscript influence.
For further discussion, join the Nature Network group Citation in science.
Nature 453, x; 26 June 2008

Becoming a peer-reviewer -- 19 June 2008

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:50:30 -0000

“How does one become a reviewer for Nature journals?” asks Wen Jiang of Canada’s University of Toronto in Nature Nanotechnology’s Nature Network forum. Most graduate students and postdocs help their supervisors to review papers, he notes, but how can they jump from ‘subcontracted’ to ‘designated’ reviewer?
Associate editor Ai Lin Chun replies that she is looking for referees with a good publication track record, and that the journal often selects new and younger faculty members. In a recent example, an eminent professor was too busy to review, but recommended his talented graduate student. The student provided a fine, detailed and thoughtful report. “When this happens,” Chun writes, “it is not so easy to forget!”
She enjoys thoughtful, well-balanced reports that suggest improvements to the authors, all in a timely manner. “We do have a chasing system,” she says, “but it is certainly not my favourite thing to do!” Chun adds that sometimes even established professors provide terrible reports. “We feel less enthusiastic in asking them to review again.”

Nature 453, xii; 19 June 2008

Citation in science -- 12 June 2008

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:59:55 -0000

Does research need new measuring sticks? The Nature Network group Citation in Science hopes to find common ground among researchers, funders, information providers and others concerning the measures of research output.
Allan Sudlow of the British Library lists common ways in which citations are manipulated or otherwise abused. ‘The art of counting’, a post by Nature Publishing Group product developer Ian Mulvany, is a useful account of how the impact factor and the H-index are calculated, and concludes that there are many growing areas of contribution such as blogs and open data sets that, at present, are ignored by such metrics. Another post explores whether the number of times an article is downloaded from the Internet could be more informative than its citation counts.
Biologist David Colquhoun of University College London argues that publication metrics are inappropriate for assessing people: “The pressure to produce cheap headline-grabbing work will be enormous. The long-term reputation of UK science will surely be damaged by this sort of bean-counting approach.”

Nature 453, xi; 12 June 2008

test

Maxine Clarke — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:21:48 -0000

Technorati Profile

Consequences of error -- 5 June 2008

Maxine Clarke — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:29:37 -0000

Does a scientist who has had three patents in the past five years, but only three papers, each cited just three times, deserve more recognition than one with five Nature papers and 1,000 citations? Does a scientist who works in a hot field and has made nice contributions deserve more credit than another working in a less glamorous, lonelier field, who has made equally profound contributions? These questions — which were often difficult to answer — were uppermost in the mind of Nature Medicine’s editor Juan Carlos Lopez when he recently served as one of the judges for a young scientist award, as he describes at Spoonful of medicine.
Lopez reflects that if he and his fellow judges made a mistake in their decision, the consequences would not be all that serious for the scientist who should have won. But similar questions are also considered by grant reviewers. In such cases, wrong decisions “can lead to a lab’s shutdown, to fired postdocs and to truncated careers, which, alas, are becoming more and more common”.

Nature 453, x; 5 June 2008

An author's road to success -- 29 May 2008

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 29 May 2008 07:53:48 -0000

The editors of Nature Nanotechnology invited Ennio Tasciotti, the author of a recent paper in the journal (E. Tasciotti et al. Nature Nanotech. 3, 151–157; 2008), to share his story of the road to success — from planning experiments to writing the manuscript — with Nature Network readers.
Tasciotti says that, at first, the idea of writing a manuscript for publication in a Nature journal seemed “very scary” to him. “When I first wrote my paper (I rewrote it at least 10 times) I basically wrote it thinking in Italian. Very flowery… too flowery. If I think about how many files I had gathered to generate a publication of only 8 pages… it’s something that still affects me! But those 8 pages tell everything that was important to say. Scientific English is a very simple language.”
His advice to prospective authors is that you don’t have to use too many words, specify too much information in one sentence, or write everything you have in your mind. “Keep it simple!” Another tip is to read a lot of papers, especially those from the journal you want to publish in.

Nature 453, xi; 29 May 2008

Peer review by taxpayer -- 22 May 2008

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 22 May 2008 14:23:25 -0000

Massimo Pinto of Italy’s Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome has discovered an unusual qualification for being a peer reviewer of research done at Italian institutions: paying your taxes. Since 2006, Italians have been allowed to donate 0.5% of their taxes to selected non-profit organizations. On his Nature Network blog, Science in the Bel Paese, Pinto points out that individuals can elect to donate their contributions to specific research institutes.
The process could have the effect of bypassing the peer-review system for research projects, which, Pinto argues, could have dire effects on research in a country such as Italy, where science-funding levels are low. Some institutes have even taken to advertising for donations, but providing no details of the research the tax money will fund. “The particular advert that irritated me was a dialogue between two young citizens,” writes Pinto. “One was asking whether the researchers in XYZ University were really going to deliver results, and the other one replied, reassuringly, that they were among the very best in Europe. Donating to them was a guarantee of success.”
Nature 453, xi; 22 May 2008

Plant informatics -- 15 May 2008

Maxine Clarke — Fri, 16 May 2008 12:47:02 -0000

Scientific informatics programmes require massive financial investment, so it is difficult for governments to decide which ones to support. One programme that has been successful in securing funding is the iPlant Collaborative — a ‘cyberinfrastructure’ collaborative for the plant sciences. Recently set up through an initial US$50 million grant from the US National Science Foundation to a five-institution consortium, the iPlant Community’s mission is to enable conceptual advances through integrative, computational thinking.
Matt Day, NPG’s database publisher, reports on Nascent blog how the iPlant Collaborative, using workshops and other activities, will encourage plant scientists to decide on the range of projects that would be most useful to the field. The outcome should be a set of ‘grand challenges’ from which new informatics projects will grow. Because the collaborative is an open exercise, it should provide a fascinating window to anyone who wants to see how scientists discuss big, and no doubt contentious, issues.
Nature 453, xiv; 15 May 2008

Web 2.0 and biology -- 8 May 2008

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 08 May 2008 12:24:51 -0000

According to a recent online survey, most biologists don’t read science blogs or participate in social networking sites (see discussion at Gobbledygook blog). Biologists prefer to read the literature; Web 2.0 sites for scientists haven’t yet built up a reputation for accuracy; and online tools useful to scientists are unlikely to be found on Facebook or Digg. Does this mean that Web 2.0 (the name sometimes given to the interactive web) is not working for biologists, or just that it is too new for them?
Right now, the different pieces of Web 2.0 don’t quite fit together to provide a useful, seamless service for most biologists, says Gobbledygook author Martin Fenner — although the story is different for chemistry, as is mentioned in the comments section of his blog. But one route to such a project’s success is to focus on how it can improve science, rather than get distracted by all possible uses of the technology. An example: Web 2.0 should make the process of paper writing much easier, through online writing, reference sharing, and collaboration and coordination tools.
Nature 453, xii; 8 May 2008

Ghost authorship --1 May 2008

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:41:02 -0000

A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (J. Ross et al. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 299, 1800–1812; 2008) stimulated discussions of ghost-writing and guest authorship in several NPG blogs (summarized at Nautilus).
The article by Ross et al. documented a drug-industry practice of paying unidentified authors to write a paper, and adding as authors the names of academics who were not substantially involved in the research. The practice conceals the pharmaceutical industry’s role, it says, and potentially misleads doctors and other readers.
Integrity in medical research is paramount, according to the Spoonful of medicine blog, and yet it is common for principal investigators to comment on drafts by postdocs rather than actually writing a paper. The blog goes on to compare and contrast paid-for authorship (or non-authorship) with standard practice in academic laboratories.
Nature Network presents a discussion of the long history of honorary authorship and whether medical writers should receive an acknowledgement or credit as authors.
Nature 453, xii; 1 May 2008

NPG archiving policy -- 24 April 2008

Maxine Clarke — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 13:50:16 -0000

After speaking at a recent conference, Nature Medicine’s Editor Juan Carlos Lopez writes on Spoonful of Medicine, “It was fascinating to see how difficult it was for some people to understand that scientific publishing costs money, and that there are different models to recover your costs — the author-pays model, the subscription model and everything in between … publishing groups ought to choose the model that works best for each of them. In our case, the subscription-based model is the only one that seems viable for the time being. How difficult is it to get this point?”
NPG’s licence policy is consistent with a newly issued requirement by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) that authors self-archive published research that the NIH has funded: “When a manuscript is accepted for publication in an NPG journal, authors are encouraged to submit the author’s version of the accepted paper (the unedited manuscript) to PubMedCentral or other appropriate funding body’s archive, for public release six months after publication.”
Nature 452, x; 24 April 2008

Good paper journal club -- 17 April 2008

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:35:56 -0000

Many scientific research papers tend to be jargon-ridden, written for a specialist audience, and generally a struggle to read. But how can busy scientists find, and hence learn from, well-written papers? Earmarking clearly written manuscripts as one comes across them takes time, as does looking more closely at papers unrelated to one’s own discipline.
The Nature Network good paper journal club, run by a group of scientists — Martin Fenner, Linda Cooper and Richard Grant – is a collaborative online effort to help promote good scientific writing. Any scientist can join the group, select papers to be posted on the site and then discuss them online, and highlight the parts considered to be nicely written. The Network group has also set up a way to tag these exemplary papers in Connotea, a free online bookmarking service for scientific references. These easily accessible, shared resources should help provide guidance for scientists wishing to write their papers well.
Nature 452, x; 17 April 2008

Science by blogging -- 10 April 2008

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:13:57 -0000

Scientists know more than what they publish in peer-reviewed journals. And blogs can be a good medium for disseminating this tacit knowledge, says Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies at Columbia University, New York, in a Commentary that is published in Nature Geoscience (Nature Geosci. 1, 208; 2008), and discussed in Peer-to-Peer and Climate Feedback.
In the same issue of the journal (Nature Geosci. 1, 209; 2008), Myles Allen at the University of Oxford, UK, describes having his peer-reviewed work criticized and misinterpreted on the Internet by people who would not subject their conclusions to peer review, and wonders “Can science survive Web 2.0?” He concludes that the Internet, “far from creating a level playing field, just ploughs it up and makes the game impossible”. Yet Schmidt remains optimistic: “Our ability to do science and enhance its relevance in public life relies on the community’s willingness to engage, inspire and inform. Blogs are one way to do that, and they can excel at providing the context that is so often missing in other media. Not every scientist needs to have one, but maybe every scientific field does.”
Nature 452, x; 10 April 2008

Confidentiality of peer-review -- 3 April 2008

Maxine Clarke — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:17:07 -0000

Sighs of relief were heard from editors after a court ruling denying Pfizer access to confidential peer-review documents from the New England Journal of Medicine (see Nature 452, 6–7; 2008).
On Nature Medicine’s blog Spoonful of medicine, Juan-Carlos Lopez expresses concern that the court’s decision was strongly influenced by Pfizer’s inability to produce sufficiently convincing arguments. If a party made a better case to see journals’ confidential information, he muses, would the court rule in favour of the complainant, setting a devastating precedent?
Nature journals protect the anonymity of their peer reviewers. But as the Pfizer case shows, policies are subject to testing in the courts. Although editors ask peer reviewers to state their opinions of a paper plainly, they also advise them to avoid offensive language; remarks that may cause needless offence; or comments that reveal confidential information about other matters. These guidelines strongly reduce the likelihood of a journal being forced to reveal the identity of a reviewer.
Nature 452, xiii; 3 April 2008

In the Field -- 27 March 2008

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:51:20 -0000

There is never a dull moment on In the Field, Nature reporters’ blog for scientific conferences and events. Rachel Courtland recently blogged from the American Physical Society conference in New Orleans on a Town Hall talk on ultra-high pressures: “The basic idea? Squeeze hard on any element, ratchet up the temperature, and you end up with some unexpected new phases. At high enough pressures and temperatures, ordinary, transparent water becomes opaque. Push even further, and it becomes transparent. Dive down into Jupiter’s atmosphere, and the pressures quickly become so high that even hydrogen becomes metallic.”
Simultaneously, Eric Hand was rocking at the lunar and planetary science conference in Houston. Read about the graduate student who was shot at Northern Illinois University, but still turned in his conference poster on time, and enjoy a valedictory account of NASA administrator Mike Griffin’s lecture and the characteristically blunt question and answer session that followed it.
Nature 452, xiii; 27 March 2008

Retractions and corrections -- 20 March 2008

Maxine Clarke — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:09:04 -0000

The recent retraction by Nobel laureate Linda Buck and colleagues of a 2001 Nature paper sparked discussions on NPG blogs. On Action Potential, the Nature Neuroscience blog, Debra Speert calls it “the highest profile retraction that I can recall in neuroscience”, and on the Nature Network neuroscience forum readers are asked for their views on the role of journals and scientists in retracting published work.
The Nature journals correction policy is described at the Author and Reviewers’ website. For a retraction or other type of correction to be published, all authors typically need to sign it. If some of the authors do not agree, the editors seek advice from peer reviewers and, if necessary, the institution and/or funder. In the event that the retraction or correction is published, the name(s) of the dissenting author(s) are noted in the text of the correction. More information about the Buck et al. retraction is in a News story (Nature 452, 13; 2008), and includes a clarification from one of the paper’s authors in the online comment thread.
Nature 452, xii; 20 March 2008

Improving standards of posters -- 13 March 2008

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:48:18 -0000

Posters are an important tool for communicating research findings to a large audience, but their value can be hit-and-miss, according to Martin Fenner’s Nature Network blog Gobbledygook. The research presented in many posters will never be peer-reviewed or published. And although at some meetings the poster presentation leads to stimulating discussions, at others, Fenner says, it is mainly “a trick to increase conference attendance”.
The authors of a paper in Deutsches Ärzteblatt interviewed poster authors and attendees at a conference and found that although poster-session attendance was very low, the event was valued by younger scientists and by the meeting’s moderators. Almost one-third of the posters had already been presented elsewhere.
Fenner concludes that poster presentations should be taken more seriously. Meeting organizers should select abstracts through a competitive peer-review process, rejecting those that have already been presented or published, and should allow space and time for viewing posters during a meeting.
Nature 452, xii; 13 March 2008

Nature Network neuroscience group -- 6 March 2008

Maxine Clarke — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:47:39 -0000

With more than 100 members, the neuroscience group is one of the fastest growing areas of Nature Network. It recently started an online journal club for neuroscientists to discuss the latest research and trends.
As with a traditional journal club, interesting papers from any journal are featured, beginning with an account of the paper by a student or postdoc in the neuroscience discipline concerned who was not involved in the work being discussed.
This journal club is designed to teach non-specialists about certain neuroscience subfields that may be of interest to them, as well as to highlight important findings for specialists. Participants ask questions about data and conclusions, or the implementation of particular methodologies; discuss why additional data would help solidify conclusions; and suggest next steps.
It is almost two months since the journal club began, and five papers have already been discussed. Topics range from delivering anaesthesia to manufacturing hair cells, as well as controversial debate about glia, flies and sexual preference.
Nature 452, x; 6 March 2008

Two times two isn't always four -- 28 February 2008

Maxine Clarke — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 07:24:49 -0000

One of Nature Medicine’s peer reviewers recently told the editors that it is unreasonable of the journal to seek advice from more than three reviewers for a paper, because it places an undue burden on authors.
Juan-Carlos Lopez, the journal’s chief editor, explains on the blog Spoonful of medicine that this practice, which is not undertaken lightly, is often necessary. One reason for this is that one of the referees may be someone who has not reviewed for the journal before, who may turn out to be either too tough or the opposite — what editors call “wet”.
Second, many submissions to Nature Medicine are multidisciplinary studies. In some cases, the editor will need one reviewer with expertise on animal experiments, another to advise on potential relevance to human disease, and others who are knowledgeable in the various disciplines and technologies involved.
Third, editors don’t ask authors to address every point each referee raises. So, as Lopez says, “two referees times two does not necessarily equal four sets of comments”!
Nature 451, xiii; 28 February 2008

Double-blind peer-review -- 21 February 2008

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:05:06 -0000

In the space of a few days, Nature’s Editorial on double-blind peer review (Nature 451, 605–606; 2008) had gathered almost 50 comments on the Peer-to-Peer blog.
The Editorial concluded that double-blind peer review (in which both authors and reviewers are anonymous) is unlikely to be used at Nature, but asked readers for their views. In a torrent of comments, a theme emerged among self-defined junior researchers that the current single-blind system is biased against them in favour of established investigators.
But “Bob O’H” performed a model calculation that suggests that double-blind review merely shifts the bias so that “the very famous” actually do better, as do “the very obscure”; the scientists who lose out are the ones in the middle. Another view expressed is that in journals with high rejection rates, reviews are of lower quality.
Would double-blinding affect review quality? Or would it result in more scientists declining to review for journals? Your comments are welcome!
Nature 451, xvi; 21 February 2008

What's in a Jane? -- 14 February 2008

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:01:47 -0000

A new web-based application aims to help scientists determine the journal most appropriate for publishing their results and select appropriate peer reviewers. The application, called Jane (journal/author name estimator), is described in the Nautilus post What’s in a Jane?.
Jane works by comparing sample text input by the aspiring author with that of published journal articles. At present, Jane has some teething troubles, as demonstrated by a trial run, but could an automatic selector ever be the best method of selecting the journal in which to publish one’s results?
Suggestions and advice are readily available from scientists in the field, who hear about work at talks or read about it in a preprint. And journals provide author guidance on their websites about editorial scope, impact factor and so on. Nature, for example, is looking for novel results, not something similar to work that has just been published. It will be a sad day, according to Nautilus, when science journals publish articles selected for them by computer.
Nature 451, xiii; 14 February 2008

Duplicate publication -- 7 February 2008

Maxine Clarke — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 19:11:43 -0000

A Commentary suggesting widespread duplicate publication (Nature 451, 397–399; 2008) has caused a storm of responses. Reactions across the NPG blogs and forums are captured on Nautilus.
The Publishing in the New Millennium forum on Nature Network reports an informed and passionate debate among scientists about whether duplicate publication is a problem in their fields and, if it is, how it can be stemmed. And at the Nature Precedings forum, Hilary Spencer asks whether posting papers on a preprint server — previously suggested to serve as a possible check and balance in the peer-review system — may encourage plagiarism. Publishers can search for duplicates among manuscripts submitted to their own journals, but a plagiarism-detection system across all publishers, currently in trial, might be more useful. It will, however, add to publication costs.
For authors wishing to submit to Nature journals, the editors provide guidance on issues including plagiarism and due credit for unpublished data at our Authors & Referees’ website.
Nature 451, xi; 7 February 2008

Nature Chemistry -- 31 January 2008

Maxine Clarke — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 18:23:11 -0000

The journal Nature Chemistry will not appear until early 2009, but its chief editor, Stuart Cantrill, is already planning its content … and writing about it. Cantrill writes on the Sceptical Chymist, the NPG blog that discusses research and events of interest to the chemical community, that the name is the only part of the journal that exists so far — but that things will quickly change. In his series of ‘Journal journeys’, Cantrill is keeping a diary of how Nature Chemistry is taking shape. Readers can follow the journeys at Sceptical Chymist.
The first entry, posted on 21 January, is called ‘Day -11’, because Cantrill officially begins his new role on 1 February. Until then, he will be handling manuscripts submitted to Nature Nanotechnology, where he is currently senior editor.
His first task for Nature Chemistry will begin on 31 January, the closing date for applications for associate editor positions. He will be looking through them all, but seeking out those that contain no spelling mistakes and include all the requested information and documents.
Nature 451, xi; 31 January 2008

Welcome to Indigenus -- 24 January 2008

Maxine Clarke — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 17:54:24 -0000

Welcome to Indigenus, the latest member of the NPG blogosphere! It is the blog of the equally new portal Nature India, a one-stop site for information on Indian science.
In her inaugural post, Subhra Priyadarshini, editor of Nature India, asks Indigenus readers what content Nature India should provide. Among the replies, Bikash Mohanty writes that much published Indian research is repetition of the work done in “so called scientifically advanced countries”. He thinks Nature India should highlight original Indian research.
Arun Kumar Chokkappa suggests Nature India lists and tracks the funding opportunities that exist in the region, which “would be an eye opener for so many budding scientists who can’t afford to knock on the doors of NIH and Wellcome Trust”. In addition, Chokkappa believes that Nature India could help advance careers by putting ambitious students in touch with established scientists.
Vinod Jyothikumar hopes that the Nature India portal will result in more international collaborators becoming interested in research in India.
Nature 451, xi; 24 January 2008

From Lab Life to JoVe -- 17 January 2008

Maxine Clarke — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 12:50:02 -0000

On her Nature Network blog, Lab Life, Anna Kushnir tells of how her blog got her invited to the SciFoo conference at the Googleplex last summer. There, she met Moshe Pritsker and Nikita Bernstein of the online Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE). The meeting led to a part-time job starting a blog on JoVE’s website.
In her first JoVE blog post, Anna describes her difficulties in learning how to do transcardial perfusion on mice. “Oh how I could have used a video of the procedure… How I would have loved to rewind back to the part where he inserts the needle in just the right place in the heart to keep it beating while pushing the desired solution through the animal. Instead, I had two pages of manically scribbled, incomplete notes that I referred to as if they were sacred texts for the next two years.” She writes that JoVE’s videos — professionally filmed and reviewed by editors for quality, integrity and authenticity — present even very difficult techniques in a “pausable, rewindable, and easily comprehensible format”.
Nature 451, x; 17 January 2008

Stripped Science -- 10 January 2008

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:00:12 -0000

One of the new blogs on the block at Nature Network is Stripped Science, in which Viktor Poór posts short comic strips about lab life. Viktor is a PhD student working on a peptide called hepcidin that is important in iron metabolism.
Working in the lab can be quite boring — repeating the same steps of pipetting or centrifugation all day long — and Viktor wonders what lab life might be like from a bacteria’s point of view. He also has some amusing fantasies about fighting boredom in the microscope room. In another strip, he shows how cell-culture contamination can be turned from a frustration into a pastime, and in another, he offers biologists some tips about the best way to spend their time at conferences — and it isn’t listening to the presentations, networking or sightseeing.
Stripped Science brings smiles of recognition to Nature Network users, including, no doubt, any bacteria among them. Viktor welcomes comments and suggestions, which you can make online at the blog, now posting at a regular frequency of twice a week.
Nature 451, ix; 10 January 2007

Climate change at Second Nature -- 3 January 2008

Maxine Clarke — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 12:53:17 -0000

For those concerned about the effects of conference air travel on the environment, Second Nature, NPG’s archipelago in Second Life, was the virtual venue for a series of talks coinciding with the United Nations climate-change conference held in Bali in December (see Joanna Scott’s blog for details).
Tara LaForce from Imperial College London spoke about whether and how we might capture carbon dioxide from power plants, compress it, and store it long-term in various geological structures such as oil reservoirs and deep saline aquifers. And, in another lecture, Euan Nisbet of Royal Holloway University in Surrey, UK, talked about the necessity for accurate monitoring of the climate, greenhouse gases and ‘top producers’ to have any realistic hope of tackling global warming. Both of these talks, and their associated slides, are available through Scott’s blog.
If you are interested in giving your own research talk in this global environment-friendly format, please contact Joanna via her blog, or find her in Second Life, where she is known as Joanna Wombat.
Nature 451, viii; 3 January 2008

One-click cell lines--20/27 December 2007

Maxine Clarke — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 12:48:55 -0000

On his Nature Network blog, John Wilbanks entertains the idea of e-commerce for biological research materials. Whether plasmids, cell lines, mice or fish, such materials — a “treasure trove of implicit knowledge and encoded experience” — are hoarded by the owning lab for more publications, or simply decay from neglect after a graduate student or postdoc moves on. Imagine the benefits to scientists’ ability to build on published research, Wilbanks says, if an Amazon-style system existed where one could “search the web, drop in a credit card number, and get a cell line via fedex in four days”.
The unloved plasmid or the one-time cell line of the classic paper are currently: not findable online, not available by digital contract, not fulfilled by anyone other than the creator, and credited only by a citation. These four elements, Wilbanks argues, are needed to achieve “one-click” and could be fulfilled by existing search engines, standard contracts and repositories. The idea would be part of a research web to haul scientific tool-making out of the sixteenth century and into the network.
Nature 450, xv; 20 December 2007

Manuscript transfer between journals -- 13 December 2007

Maxine Clarke — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:57:48 -0000

The Neuroscience Peer-Review Consortium is an imaginative alliance of neuroscience journals. From 1 January 2008, if a manuscript is not accepted by one journal in the consortium, the authors can submit it to a second consortium journal and have the reviews from the first journal forwarded to the second. This is similar to the NPG journals’ manuscript-transfer system, but is subject-specific rather than publisher-specific.
In a related post on Action Potential, the Nature Neuroscience blog, Noah Gray points out that consortium journals must drop the review practice of ‘confidential comments’ to the editor. Noah asks his author and reviewer readers for their views on this aspect of the proposal; so far more than 30 have contributed to a thoughtful discussion. Most readers liked the proposed system, but were divided about the confidential comments question — some feel that there is no place for such comments, others put forward various reasons for their value, and yet others are not sure why they need be excluded from consortium journals. See Action Potential for all opinions in full.
Nature 450, xiii; 13 December 2007

Sceptical Chymist on careers -- 6 December 2007

Maxine Clarke — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 14:23:07 -0000

The Sceptical Chymist, the Nature journals’ chemical community blog, has been tracking the career advancement of several guest bloggers.
Prospective Professor writes: “after eleven years of being entrenched in higher education, I am finally making a break for it. Yes, I am looking for my first job.” He describes conflicting advice on writing cover letters. Whom to believe? “The one that told me, ‘The cover letter is critical. It’s your one chance to get someone’s attention.’ Or the other that said, ‘In our department, they ripped off the cover letter and threw it away.’ Sigh…”
Rookie Rocky, on the other hand, is coming to terms with new professorship status. He notes that professors enjoy preferred seating in the front of the seminar auditorium. “To actually sit in a ‘business-class’ seat as a brand new assistant professor along with my colleagues brought … a thrill of excitement, needless to say, and a lot of pressure: now, even a boring seminar won’t be a good chance to doze off!”
Vist Prospective Professor’s and Rookie Rocky’s collected posts for the full story from each perspective.
Nature 450, xiii; 6 December 2007

Byline position of authors -- 29 November 2007

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:19:32 -0000

Having publications in peer-reviewed journals is a main criterion for promotion, tenure or funding, yet not all co-authors are created equal. Jonathan D. Wren et al. (EMBO Rep. 8, 988–991; 2007) have investigated what readers think of the role of authors on the basis of their byline position and the total number of authors on a publication. Although first or last authors are generally apportioned most credit for the work, it is not known exactly how much authors are perceived to have contributed from their byline position.
Wren et al. surveyed chairs of promotion and tenure committees, and found that respondents felt that the first author in a three-person byline had made the greatest contribution to the work performed, whereas the last author deserved most credit for the conception and supervision of the project. According to this survey, adding authors to a publication apparently does not affect the relative overall credit afforded to the last author, but the perceived contributions of all other authors suffer a drop in value. (For more details, see Nautilus).
Nature 450, xiii; 29 November 2007

Plus maths competition -- 22 November 2007

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 14:53:54 -0000

How are your mathematics skills? The Internet magazine Plus, which exposes readers to the beauty and the practical applications of mathematics, is organizing a science-writing competition, open to new writers from anywhere in the world who can explain a mathematical topic or application they think people need to know about. Further details of how to enter and the prizes can be seen at Plus. The deadline is 31 March 2008.
Plus has also teamed up with NPG to bring maths to the Nature Network. Nature Network is a stage for science discussion that allows scientists to meet, interact, comment on the latest news, debate current topics or exchange information. Members can create groups for their own labs or organizations, or for their own subject area. Plus has launched a mathematics forum to provide a platform “for anyone who wants to discuss maths, whether it’s actual maths, maths teaching, the portrayal of maths in the media, or good and bad maths content elsewhere on the internet.”
Nature 450, xii; 22 November 2007

Author accountability -- 15 November 2007

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 14:53:35 -0000

In a 1 November Editorial (see Nature 450, 1; 2007) and at Nautilus, Nature explores whether co-author accountability can improve research integrity. As part of this exercise, we took a snapshot look at the popularity of Author Contributions statements in Nature.
We strongly encourage authors to make these statements, specifying the work each author contributed to the paper, but it is not mandatory. Should that change? Part of the answer to this question lies in how useful authors find the idea. In the past three or four issues of Nature, about half of the Articles and Letters carried contributions statements.
Here is an example, from the 1 November 2007 issue: “A.C. and J.H.H. conducted the observations at the telescope. A.C. reduced the data, and P.W.L. performed the Monte Carlo modelling. A.C. wrote the main paper, and P.W.L. wrote the Supplementary Information. All authors discussed the results and implications and commented on the manuscript at all stages.”
Please visit Nautilus to give us your opinion.
Nature 450, xiii; 15 November 2007

Identity of the first scientist -- 8 November 2007

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:08:44 -0000

Who was the first scientist? The Science Writers’ forum on Nature Network extends the topic, which was previously debated at the Royal Institution. At the debate, reports forum moderator Brian Clegg, “Lewis Wolpert championed Archimedes, I stood up for Roger Bacon, and Frank James spoke for James Clerk Maxwell. Archimedes won, with Bacon a close second.” According to Clegg, the reasoning was that “Archimedes was the first to use maths in science, Bacon the first to emphasize the importance of experimental verification, maths and the communication of results, and Maxwell because the word ‘scientist’ wasn’t invented until his time.” Although the question is arbitrary, Clegg invites nominations, with a reason, for the person you think of as the first scientist.
So far, these include Galileo, Eve, ‘Uncle Quentin’ — a character from a children’s book series — and the unnamed man, woman or ape who first worked out how to make fire. Post your suggestions at the Network forum and receive a copy of Nurture, our authors’ magazine.
Nature 450, xiii ; 8 November 2007

Publishing in the new millennium -- 1 November 2007

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 09:24:01 -0000

“Are you satisfied with the current scientific publishing process?” asks Anna Kushnir, a student at Harvard Medical School, in the Publishing in the new Millennium forum on Nature Network. Maxine Clarke of Nature responded that most published authors say that the peer-review and publication process has improved their work, and some authors even say decisions not to publish work, when they include constructive criticism, have helped them to improve their papers for publication elsewhere.
Craig Rowell, of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, replied that although the peer-review process does a very good job of quality control, people sometimes forget about the “gate-keeper” role of the editor. Even when reviewers like a paper, if the editor disagrees, the journal might not accept it. The role of the editor is to decide, after review, whether a paper in which the science is technically correct meets the publication criteria of that particular journal. Unfortunately, writes Craig, some mentors do not explain this to their students, let alone keep it in mind for themselves.
Nature 450, xiii; 1 November 2007

Clear writing -- 25 October 2007

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:12:30 -0000

Juan-Carlos Lopez, Editor of Nature Medicine, writes on Spoonful of medicine: “Checking the literature in preparation for our monthly News & Views meeting, my colleague Clare Thomas spotted this recent paper from PLoS Pathogens [X. Contreras et al. PLoS Pathog. 3, e146; 2007]: HMBA Releases P-TEFb from HEXIM1 and 7SK snRNA via PI3K/Akt and Activates HIV Transcription. No offense intended to the authors or the editors, but I think it’s safe to say that there’s one too many abbreviations in the title. Can anyone out there trump it?”
Meanwhile, there is plenty of writing advice online. The Nature Nanotechnology Asia Pacific and Beyond forum on Nature Network features a tips column for technical writing. Here, for example, the sentence “The design of the microscope incorporates aberration lenses, 3 different lasers, which are suspended above the lenses which is housed in a chamber” is simplified by associate editor Ai Lin Chun to “The microscope consists of aberration lenses and three different lasers. Each laser is suspended above the lens and housed in a chamber.”

Nature 449, xiii; 25 October 2007

Postdocs and students of the world -- 18 October 2007

Maxine Clarke — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:31:25 -0000

In the Post-docs and Graduate Students of the World forum on Nature Network, Craig Rowell, a research associate at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, is looking beyond the postdoc to the next step. He asks whether group members or their friends have successfully moved on from a postdoctoral position to the next stage in academic research, or to another career. Members of the group share their experiences of a range of careers in or related to scientific research, including quite a few tips and comments from Nature journal editors in response to questions about careers in publishing.
In another thread on this Network group, Anthony Power, a graduate student at the Ottawa Health Research Institute in Canada, invites other members to share their postdoc experiences: tips on how to find the right lab, approach potential supervisors and secure funding, as well as how to make the transition to being an independent scientist.
The postdoctoral and graduate student group, one of many groups, forums and blogs on Nature Network, is open for anyone to join.

Nature 449, xv; 18 October 2007

Ask the editor -- 11 October 2007

Maxine Clarke — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 10:27:01 -0000

On Nature’s social networking website, Nature Network, we’ve created a new group called ‘Ask the Nature Editor’. Here, several editors have agreed to answer your burning questions about publishing in Nature (and the other Nature journals), peer review and the scientific publishing process. We invite you to join the group — it’s your chance to learn more about what goes on here, straight from the editors themselves. In the coming months, we’ll have other Q&A rounds focused on different publishing topics, such as careers in scientific publishing and online communications tools.
Current topics of discussion in the Q&A forum include training for peer reviewers; what happens when manuscripts are submitted that are not written in journal style or not well written; and the pros and cons of submitting modified famous works of art as suggestions for the journal’s cover.
If there are any topics you’d like the forum to cover in future, please post your suggestions at the URL above. We look forward to seeing you there.

Nature 449, xiii; 11 October 2007

Independence of peer review -- 4 October 2007

Maxine Clarke — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:24:25 -0000

Robert Higgs, a political economist at the Independent Institute, writes on Peer-to-Peer: “Any editor of a peer-reviewed journal who desires to reject or accept a submission can easily do so by choosing appropriate referees. Unfortunately, personal vendettas, ideological conflicts, professional jealousies, methodological disagreements, sheer self-promotion and irresponsibility are as much part of the scientific world as any other.”
He goes on to point out that “scientific research at the upper echelons occurs within a fairly small world,” in which researchers attend the same conferences and review each other’s work for funding and publication. “If you do not belong to this tight fraternity,” Higgs argues, “it becomes extremely difficult to gain a hearing for your work, to publish in a ‘top’ journal, or to acquire a government grant.”
He concludes by warning the non-scientist to be sceptical of government-funded research used to justify a government policy and scientists who appear at press conferences alongside politicians or activists. Your comments on this fiery post are welcome, here or at Peer to Peer.
Nature 449, xiii; 4 October 2007

Nature and PRISM -- 27 September 2007

Maxine Clarke — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:18:42 -0000

A news in brief article reported that the Association of American Publishers (AAP) is taking part in the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM). The PRISM initiative protests against government interference in scholarly communication. Some groups and legislators are pushing for all publicly financed research to be made freely available, whereas PRISM holds that “society is best served by sustainable business models and reasonable copyright protections”.
Timo Hannay, web publishing director at Nature Publishing Group (NPG), writes on Nascent: Nature America is a member of the AAP, we are not involved in PRISM and we have not been consulted about it. NPG has supported self-archiving in various ways and our policies are already compliant with the proposed US National Institutes of Health mandate.”
Nature’s policies can be found at our author website. Hannay’s Nascent post, with further thoughts and opinions about ‘open-access’ publishing, is highly recommended reading. See also this Nautilus post.
Nature 449, xiii; 27 September 2007

Supplementary Information -- 20 September 2007

Maxine Clarke — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:09:23 -0000

Larry Benson’s view that papers should not need Supplementary Information (Nature 449, 24; 2007) has elicited lively debate on Nautilus.
Rather than being a way to place important-but-not-essential data at the readers’ disposal — as originally envisaged — Supplementary Information (SI) has proliferated: ten pages are not unusual, and Nature’s average is about five, writes Benson.
“Maybe the Editor(s) need to clamp down on the SI abuse?”, opines Richard Grant in response. Massimo Sandal, however, disagrees, saying that it is not the raw information that is the main problem, but that SI is “usually not as carefully crafted as the paper itself”. He concedes that he has read SI that was “wonderfully made and useful”, citing as an example a paper by P. W. K. Rothemund.
Matthieu Vermeren sums up the mood, saying SI was initially “a great way to link a paper with files that are difficult to print such as movies”. But, he adds, it now contains “vast amounts of data that could either be part of the paper or not shown”.
Nature 449, xiii: 20 September 2007

Submitting in Word 2007 -- 13 September 2007

Maxine Clarke — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:33:53 -0000

Howard Ratner reports on Nascent, NPG’s web publishing blog, on a recent meeting at the NPG New York office of staff from Microsoft, various publishers and companies that produce editing or manuscript tracking tools to discuss problems in the use of Word 2007 in scientific publishing.
Publishers provided an overview of the stages in a journal’s publication process, from the writing of a manuscript by an author, through submission to publication, including the types of software systems and standards used. Presentations detailing incompatibilities between Word 2007 and automatic editing tools followed.
As a result of the meeting, Microsoft will establish a web page with details on how to use Word 2007 for publishing. The Nascent post provides links to more information and resources for authors.
Nature is currently testing Word 2007 manuscripts in its editorial production system. If you are using Word 2007 and would be able to send a sample manuscript (created from scratch in Word 2007) please contact us via authors@nature.com or as a comment to this post.

Nature 449, xiii; 13 September 2007

What's an author? -- 6 September 2007

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 13:45:20 -0000

‘What’s an author?’ asks Robin Rose of Oregon State University on Nautilus. Commenting on a Nature paper with 21 authors, he lists ten questions that address the validity of authorship. Nature journals do not specify a particular order or maximum number of authors, but we do strongly encourage the inclusion of a statement on the actual contribution of each co-author.
In a lively response to Rose’s post, Antoine Blanchard cites strategies developed by high-energy physicists to deal with ‘hyperauthorship’. John Quackenbush points to the realities of large-scale interdisciplinary collaborations to achieve something that could not be done alone. “We should stop worrying about who did what and instead ask how the work advances the field. This is science after all, not accounting.”
Similarly, Steven Salzberg writes: “The malaria genome paper (M. J. Gardner et al. Nature 419, 498–511; 2002) had nearly 50 authors. That was the culmination of a 6-year effort by an international consortium, and everyone on the author list (including me) spent years on some aspect of the project.”

Nature 449, xi; 6 September 2007

Wikiversity -- 30 August 2007

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 12:51:26 -0000

Nautilus highlights Wikiversity, a community for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. Wikiversity, part of the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, creates and hosts free content, multimedia learning materials and curricula for all ages in all languages, and will develop collaborative learning projects and communities. Teachers and ‘students’ (anyone wanting to learn) are invited to join the community, where anyone can edit the pages.
Wiki technology promotes collaborative webpage editing, which can be thought of as a set of ‘learning projects’ — participants learn as they edit and explore topics of interest.
With such open content, Wikiversity is unlikely to ever be officially recommended by schools or universities. But college students in many countries are already keen users of online educational resources, so there are certainly opportunities for educational publishers and Wikipedia to forge links between online learning resources and textbooks, and for academic teachers to consider these when recommending resources to students.

Nature 448, xiii; 30 August 2007

Sci Foo camp -- 23 August 2007

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 12:46:49 -0000

What do Eric Lander, Frank Wilczek, James Randi and Martha Stewart have in common? The answer can be found at Nautilus: all attended the recent Science Foo Camp, co-organized by Nature Publishing Group, O’Reilly Media and Google, and hosted at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.
The ‘Foo Camp’ format has been pioneered by O’Reilly, a publisher of computing books and organizer of technology conferences, as an antidote to restrictive formal conferences, where the best conversations seem to happen in hallways and during coffee breaks rather than at the main sessions. Foo is self-organizing, unpredictable and rather anarchic — but also quite wonderful.
Visit Nautilus for links to fuller accounts of what Henry Gee calls in his ‘End of the Pier Show’ blog “a gathering of some of the coolest and most influential scientists, technologists, engineers and thinkers on the planet”. You will be directed to Gee’s blog on Nature Network, an essay by George Dyson on the Edge website and Timo Hannay’s account on Nascent. There is lots of other blog coverage which can be accessed from this summary page.

Nature 448, xiii; 23 August 2007

Summer Nurture -- 16 August 2007

Maxine Clarke — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 10:04:58 -0000

The summer 2007 issue of Nurture, the magazine for past and present Nature journal authors, is now online.
Authors who have published original research papers in a Nature journal or a review article in the Nature Reviews journals in the past year — and, crucially, who have provided us with their addresses through the manuscript submission system — receive a hard copy.
The current issue features articles by and about authors and editors from the Nature journals, and news of our latest interactive web publications: Nature Precedings, Nature China, Nature Reports Stem Cells and Nature Reports Climate Change. It details how to use RSS feeds in PubMed searches, and provides news about Nature Network and how you can participate. Also featuring in this season’s Nurture is debate on Nature’s history, Nature’s journal club, the latest from Macmillan Science books and more — even including poetry.
Whether you read the print or the digital format, we hope you enjoy our latest news and views for authors: past, present and future.

Nature 448, xiii; 16 August 2007

Design a lab coat competition -- 9 August 2007

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 07:32:45 -0000

“Stripping off the white coat” is recommended on the Mind the Gap blog at Nature Network. Jennifer Rohn reveals how she and her partner-in-design Wynn Abbott have devised a competition to challenge fashion designers “from students all the way up to celebs, to reinterpret lab coats for the twenty-first century”. The coats, according to the criteria, must still have a protective function, but they must also have a design that’s “fun, fresh, sexy and original”.
Rohn and Abbott plan to make a formal call for designs within the next few months, and to have a panel of judges make a decision from the shortlist in autumn. In addition to the main prize, they plan to give out awards for the best accessories, including masks, gloves and safety goggles. “So come on, people, pimp my coat!” Rohn writes. “I’m tired of putting on the same old stained, shapeless one every morning.”
If you would like to comment on the idea or see more details, including an elegant example design, see Jennifer’s Nature Network blog post or Nautilus.

Nature 448, xi; 9 August 2007

Female road of science -- 2 August 2007

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 07:27:48 -0000

Writing on Nautilus, Monica Zoppè of the Institute of Clinical Physiology in Pisa, Italy, proposes a “female road of science”.
Funding agencies distribute money on the basis of competition — an attitude, writes Zoppè, typical of males. Women, she adds, “are more inclined to collaboration… and if forced to compete do so reluctantly”. The best way to grant women their share of funding (50%), she says, would be to have one channel for men, “in which male scientists set the rules and judge applications; and one for women, managed by and dedicated to female scientists”.
In the online discussion, in which we invite you to participate (at the URL above or in a comment to this post), Bill Hooker writes: “I would be sorry to be trapped by my Y chromosome in the other, competitive, track — but I would not oppose the new system in the slightest. Since my hypothesis is that greater emphasis on cooperation over competition would vastly improve the infrastructure of science, such a system as Dr Zoppè proposes can only benefit me as a test of that hypothesis.”

Nature 448, xiii; 2 August 2007

Reviewing reviewer performance -- 26 July 2007

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 07:23:37 -0000

Peer-to-Peer highlights a post on the pseudonymous FemaleScienceProfessor blog about the benefits (or lack thereof) of reviewing reviewer performance. FemaleScienceProfessor is also an editor for a journal. She writes: “I did a quick, statistically invalid analysis of the reviewer data for the past year to see whether the time it took a reviewer to complete the review was random or correlated with seniority. The quickest reviewing groups are the early-career and retired scientists.” More analysis and the reactions of some of her readers are provided at FemaleScienceProfessor’s blog post and comments section.
At the Nature journals, we do not publish reviewer statistics of this type, nor do we set out to capture information about factors such as reviewers’ gender or seniority level. Is there interest from our peer-reviewers and authors to know these sorts of statistics? Is the quickest review necessarily the ‘best’ review? What would be appropriate metrics? You can provide your thoughts by going to the Peer-to-Peer URL provided above.

Nature 448, xi; 26 July 2007

Nature Precedings -- 19 July 2007

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 07:18:24 -0000

July’s freely available Editorial in Nature Cell Biology explains the role of the preprint server — familiar to physicists, astronomers, astrophysicists and chemists — to biologists. Centre stage is given to Nature Precedings, and to how posting preprints and other documents on the site affects possible publication in Nature journals.
As described on Nautilus, Nature Precedings facilitates the sharing and discussion of prepublication data. It can host slide presentations, preprints, posters and stand-alone data. Postings are citable (DOIs) and attributable to an author. Although screened by in-house curators for scientific legitimacy (not novelty or quality), they are not peer reviewed, and, as a result, content can be posted in less than a day. The content carries a Creative Commons Attribution licence, which requires only proper citation.
The Nature journals, like many others, do not consider a posting on the site as a formal publication that would prevent consideration of a submitted manuscript for publication. But authors cannot post on Nature Precedings updated manuscript versions that evolve due to a journal’s editorial process.

Nature 448, xv; 19 July 2007

Nature Network -- 12 July 2007

Maxine Clarke — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 10:50:18 -0000

Nature Network featured in Guardian Unlimited last week. “Welcome to Facebook for professors, postdocs and PhDers in the sciences — otherwise known as Nature Network,” states the article.
Although Guardian reporter Jessica Shepherd can’t resist leading with the network’s more imaginative possibilities, notably romantic ones, the article sums up the service nicely, including this quote from Matt Brown, editor of Nature Network London: “Traditionally scientists have met, collaborated and swapped ideas through conferences and the pages of scholarly journals. These can be time consuming and rely to some extent on serendipity. Our vision for Nature Network is that every scientist in the world will have a personal profile on the site. Who knows, many years from now, traditional activities such as writing an academic paper could be peer-reviewed online.”
You can join Nature Network to blog, meet and discuss online for free. We hope you will try it out, as a hub for collaboration, to help your career prospects, or even to find a partner.

Nature 448, xi; 12 July 2007

Open science -- 5 July 2007

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:41:17 -0000

What is open science? A post on Nautilus discusses an essay on the topic by Frank Gibson of Newcastle University, UK. His role in an e-neuroscience project, Gibson writes, exposed him to a life-science domain in which “data sharing and publicly exposing methodologies has not been readily adopted”, largely owing to privacy issues and data set sizes.
The Nature journals’ policies on data availability can be found on our author and reviewers’ website. There, you can comment on emerging policies on data availability in a range of disciplines.
The Postgenomic website, Gibson notes, produces an “up-to-the minute list of the open science discourse”. “Although early days,” he continues, “maybe even the ‘open science group’ on Scintilla will be the place in future for fostering the open science community.”
NPG’s Scintilla site collects data from hundreds of news outlets, scientific blogs, journals and databases and allows users to find and share information. It is free to join, so take a look and, if you wish, contribute.
(All articles and websites can be accessed from the Nautilus URL above.)
Nature 448, xiii; 5 July 2007

Nature Network -- 28 June 2007

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:36:09 -0000

If you’ve ever wondered about starting your own blog, check out Nature Network for a listing and “recent posts” feature. It is free, quick and simple to set up a blog, and you’ll find yourself connected with researchers and others with overlapping interests.
In Mind the Gap, Jennifer Rohn records her return to the bench after a four-year absence. On planning her first experiment: “I showed what I thought was a ridiculously stripped-down plan to the lab’s two leading experts on Drosophila cell culture RNA interference: a pilot experiment with eight samples. I waited expectantly as the PhD student studied my scribbles. ‘Your first experiment in four years?’ he said dubiously. ‘Only four wells, max. Get rid of half of this.’”
In her blog Time for a Change, Linda Cooper suggests “there’s a better way to write a scientific article. Published articles are difficult to read and researchers need to be trained in how to write about research.” In one post, she explains why the active voice, useful transitions and clear subjects help readers. In another, she takes a paragraph from the Allen Brain Atlas, providing a deconstruction and revised version.
Nature 447, xiii; 28 June 2007

The Niche -- 21 June 2007

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:31:12 -0000

Editors of The Niche, the blog of the new website Nature Reports Stem Cells, are asking how Nature could improve its peer-review process for papers about cloning to prevent publication of fraudulent data. After the Hwang scandal in 2006, Nature editors sought advice on this issue from top scientists in the cloning and stem-cell fields. Eight agreed to publish abridged versions of their answers on The Niche.
The questions include whether Nature’s current review procedure is adequate for the refereeing of cloning papers and, if not, what improvements are needed; and whether the peer-review process would be improved by Nature establishing a checklist of standard criteria for authors and referees.
Read the researchers’ thoughts about whether these questions could have prevented the Hwang scandal and what strategies journals could implement to tighten up cloning papers. Feel free to join in the discussion and read other postings at The Niche — such as Attila Csordás’s insight on how the sea squirt can regenerate its whole body from its vasculature.
Nature 447, xv; 21 June 2007

Nautilus -- 14 June 2007

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:27:26 -0000

Nautilus, Nature Publishing Group’s blog for past, present and future authors, is updated several times a day with a range of relevant news stories and information for scientists. Many published papers reach a wider audience than the readers of a journal alone by being included on subject-specific e-alerts such as chemistry, neuroscience, physics and cell signalling. Nautilus also tells you which of these featured papers are freely accessible.
We discuss planned changes to Nature journal policy with you on Nautilus, seeking your input on topics such as how best to describe animal experimentation in methods sections; retraction of flawed papers; and general availability of data and source code.
Our blog posts also provide writing advice, news of awards and prizes, discussions about measures of impact and publishing news — for example, our launch of new websites and journals, or special issues of our journals or groups of journals. All posts are open for reader feedback, and an RSS feed is available. We look forward to seeing you there and reading your contributions to the discussion.
Nature 447, xiii; 14 June 2007

Nature Journal Club blog -- 7 June 2007

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:20:21 -0000

In the Journal Club, the popular weekly column published on Nature’s Research Highlights pages, a researcher presents his or her choice of a recent paper and explains why they are enthused about it. On page 617 of this issue, for example, Gautam Desiraju of the University of Hyderabad in India applauds an algorithm that predicts the structure of crystals from their chemical composition.
Because the point of any journal club, whether in person or online, is to dissect and discuss selected articles ‘around the table’, we have now launched a Journal Club blog. There, we invite readers to examine the subjects raised in the columns, archived back to January of this year. To browse all published Journal Club columns in your field, you can select by one of 18 subject categories listed on the blog’s main page. Please take a look at the entries in your research area, and, as Oliver Morton puts it, “enrich their comment threads with your insight and speculation”.
Nature 447, xi; 7 June 2007

Reviewers' web tracks -- 31 May 2007

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:09:28 -0000

Electronic communication among reviewers and publishers or granting agencies threatens peer reviewers’ anonymity, according to an entry on Nature’s Peer-to-Peer blog this week. Cristofre Martin of St George’s University in Grenada, West Indies, and Kenneth Storey of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, note that most state-of-the-art software applications embed information about the creator of the document with the normally invisible metadata of the file. But these metadata can easily be viewed, providing the user with the account information associated with the specific computer used to generate the document. Authors, journal editors, publishers and granting agencies need to be cautious about how ‘anonymous’ information is transmitted between the creator and the recipient.
Nature Publishing Group journals use a web-based peer-review system to ensure anonymity, as do many other publishers. Further details of NPG policies can be found at the authors and reviewers’ website.
Nature 447, xi;31 May 2007

Second Nature -- 24 May 2007

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:59:36 -0000

If you’ve just published in Nature and are burning to tell the world about your new work, consider giving a virtual talk. We are looking to try out some events in our amphitheatre and meeting area, Second Nature — an ‘island’ that is part of the growing online virtual world called Second Life.
Several events have already been held in Second Life. Eric Chaisson, director of the Wright Center for Science Education at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and author of the book Hubble Wars, spoke about his work and answered questions from the audience. And Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, UK, gave a talk entitled “Upgrading Humans: Why not?”
If you are interested in trying out a talk, presentation or question and answer seminar in this innovative format, register your interest by commenting at Nautilus or send an e-mail to authors@nature.com. Or, if you are already a Second Life resident, contact Joanna Wombat in Second Nature.
Nature 447, xiii; 24 May 2007

Nurture magazine -- 17 May 2007

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:44:49 -0000

Authors are often curious about what goes on at the journal after their paper is submitted. What happens to their work? Why is a press release issued and how is it created? What happens when a paper is featured in News and Views? What are the editors like? We hope that Nurture, the magazine for Nature journal authors, helps to lift the veil on some of these processes.
The latest edition of Nurture features articles on authors and editors of the Nature journals, including our latest addition Nature Photonics. It also describes the new Question & Answer format in Nature’s News and Views section, offers highlights from Nature’s history, looks at the new online publications Nature Reports Avian Flu and Nature Network Boston, provides instructions on how to write a best-selling science book and describes a new tool for visualizing the structure of proteins.
The print edition of Nurture is sent to authors who have published a paper in the past year. It is also available free of charge as a digital edition, which you can access on the author and reviewers’ website.
Nature 447, xiii; 17 May 2007

Outreach by YouTube -- 10 May 2007

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:36:52 -0000

YouTube has revolutionized the Web, with video content from the serious to the mundane. Can science co-opt this latest grassroots craze in an attempt to reach the researchers of tomorrow? On Nautilus, the Nature Publishing Group blog for past, present and future authors, a group of biological-science professors from the National University of Singapore make the intriguing suggestion of outreach via YouTube.
YouTube is a free website containing more than 70 million video clips. It’s viewed monthly by around 20 million people. Videos can be tagged with key words by the user who uploads them, and hyperlinked to other websites, such as authenticated science information sites. Hence, argue the professors, YouTube is an ideal venue for scientists to contribute expert opinions and persuasive videos to an audience “that primarily consists of impressionable 12- to 17-year-olds”. They provide a link in their Nautilus post to a dramatic example: a video documenting deforestation within Lore Lindu National Park in Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Nature 447, xi; 10 May 2007