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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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