One should never write a post called “last post”.

I would like to mention a “sort of” replacement for this blog which some of us have set up. It is a group called Nature Publishing Group news. There we’ll post news from and about Nature Publishing Group that we hope will interest Nature Network users. Please join the group, and provide feedback either here in the comments or at the NPG news forum. I hope to see you there.

The previous post was my last From The Blogosphere column for Nature. I’ve retired from it after nearly two years (the first column was on 10 May 2007).
Other editors are continuing to write the column for the journal’s author page, but it won’t appear in every issue.
The author page appears immediately before the journal’s masthead, and immediately after the “this issue” editors’ summaries, each week. Online, the author page is free to access. It can be found at the top of the journal’s table of contents, under “Also this week”, in the august company of editors’ summaries and podcasts (also free).
It’s been fun writing the column but I feel it is time to take a break and let someone else have a go.
I am continuing to write at Nautilus, and occasionally at Peer-to-Peer, so I look forward to seeing you there, or around and about at Nature Network.
Best wishes
Maxine.

A vast room of poster presentations greeted thousands of scientists at the American Geophysical Union’s annual autumn meeting, which started on 15 December 2008 in San Francisco, California. One of the posters stood out, writes Nature reporter Rex Dalton at In The Field, because it described an ‘experimental hydrology wiki’, or collaborative website for researchers in the field.
The website was created by Theresa Blume of the University of Potsdam in Germany and Llja Tromp-van Meerveld of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, with the aim of sharing knowledge about established and new methods of experimental hydrology. As well as helping people to avoid reinventing the wheel when planning measurements, and enabling users to learn from others’ mistakes, the wiki should assist researchers in choosing appropriate methodology and equipment.
All experimental hydrologists are invited to contribute to the website, either by writing or contributing to an article, or by answering questions at the site’s help desk.
Nature 457, 128; 8 January 2009

Nature Chemical Biology associate editor Catherine Goodman treats readers of the Sceptical Chymist blog to a blow-by-blow account of a typical workday. Here are some highlights:

8:53 I’m putting together an agenda for a meeting tomorrow, so that probably takes priority.

11:31 Debating the merits of a paper. Initial feeling is that sugars are cool.

12:28 Got an awesome review outline from an author … Very excited! Also had to answer some questions about proofs … and read a couple of papers as possible research highlights.

3:37 Hopefully commissioned a News & Views.

4:02 Making some notes on the review outline from earlier. Also wrote back to someone who has a cool story they want to submit to us.

In her final entry at the end of the day, Goodman reflects that, despite having a productive day, she had not devoted enough time to reviewing manuscripts. “As a result, I’ll take some papers home to read overnight and plan to devote much more time to our submissions tomorrow,” she says.
Nature 457, 6; 1 January 2009

Nautilus reports a call for authors to deposit supporting raw microarray data sets into a public database. After surveying papers from the 2007 issues of 20 journals for references to deposition of a microarray data set, Neil McKenna and colleagues write in Nature Methods (5, 991; 2008) that the rate of deposition was less than 50%. They also note that microarray data sets are not biologically interpretable unless accompanied by a description of the experimental details.
The researchers propose that journals require authors to identify a repository and accession number in their articles. (Of the 16 Nature journal papers that were part of the survey, such accession numbers were provided in 15 cases.) They also call for “a renewed collective effort from researchers, publishers and funding organizations to redress this situation and secure these data-rich research resources for posterity”.
The Nature journals have for some years required authors to submit data compliant with MIAME (minimum information about a microarray) to a public repository. (Details are here)
Nature 456, xvii; 18/25 December 2008.

Fantastic stem-cell work was presented at a press conference at the lively Society for Neuroscience meeting — but from the lacklustre Q-and-A session afterwards, you’d never know it, writes Nature reporter Alison Abbott at In the Field.
At the November meeting in Washington DC, stem-cell researchers described work on repairing irreversible inner-ear damage; conversion of frog pluripotent cells into retinal cells that could form functioning tadpole eyes; and intriguing latent stem cells in mice that might aid treatment of neurodegenerative diseases.
The authors of these studies were not only over-keen to avoid any semblance of hype, but also declined to comment to journalists on broader issues about US politics of embryonic-stem-cell research, or why there is so much low-quality adult-stem-cell research already being brought into the clinic.
Abbott remarks that it is very hard for journalists to decide how to react to and report new findings in adult-stem-cell research: “There is so much that is good, so much that is trivial, and not a clear enough signal from those in the field of where the difference lies.”
Nature 456, xiii; 11 December 2008.

If you’ve ever wanted a sneaky peek at how journals select papers, the peer-review process at Nature Chemical Biology is decoded in the journal’s December issue (Nature Chem. Biol. 4, 715; 2008), and reported at Peer-to-Peer. The editors decide whether to send a submitted manuscript for external review if it falls within the scope of the journal (that is, contains both biological and chemical components), and if it reports conceptual or methodological advances likely to open new research avenues.
Papers selected for external peer review are sent to several scientists who cover the appropriate chemical and biological expertise, and they are asked to assess the technical merits and scientific advance of the paper. After review, the editors discuss the manuscript in the context of the referees’ reports and decide to accept, decline, or request a revised manuscript.
Most published manuscripts have undergone more than one round of review by the same referees to ensure that all technical concerns have been addressed. See the Peer-to-Peer post for more insight into editorial decision-making.
Nature 456, xiii; 4 December 2008.

How can publishers add value to conferences? James Butcher, publisher of the Nature Clinical Practice journals, reports from the American Heart Association meeting earlier this month in New Orleans, Louisiana, at In The Field. He notes that many major papers presented at the conference were simultaneously published in journals, cutting across several publishers. For the authors, having the published paper available for the meeting presentation helps the media to report on the study accurately. And when the news breaks in the popular press, physicians can immediately read the complete work to understand what the study means for their patients.
Peer-reviewing and editing a paper accurately to tight timelines is expensive and difficult. But Butcher believes that it is worth the additional effort from authors, editors and publishers to expedite papers so that they can be released to coincide with oral presentation of data at conferences, because “everyone benefits from the end result”.
Nature 456, xii; 27 November 2008.
Note added since publication of this column in Nature: See also Martin Fenner’s related blog post on the JUPITER trial and how it is, or could be, reported.

The Great Beyond, the Nature News blog, provides its own perspective on the sad news of Michael Crichton’s death on 4 November. Crichton was not universally popular among scientists, possibly because his favourite theme was ‘science gone horribly wrong’ — in genetics, nanotechnology, medicine and climate.
In 1993, the year the film came out, a reviewer of Jurassic Park in Nature Biotechnology bemoaned the lack of scientific accuracy. Crichton responded in a letter to the journal: “As Alfred Hitchcock used to say, ’It’s just a movie.’”
Yet in his 2004 novel, State of Fear, Crichton presented climate change as a fraud perpetuated by activists and scientists. In support of this view, the author cited the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, asserting that his training in medicine qualified him to evaluate it. As blogger Heidi Ledford puts it: “When President George Bush invited Crichton to swing by the White House for a chat about climate change, I don’t recall hearing the author protest, ‘Hey, but it was just a novel’.”
Nature 456, xiii; 20 November 2008.

In its November editorial, Nature Reviews Microbiology (6, 794; 2008) reports that the archive of the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM_) has been made available free online: a boon for scientists, historians and the public. As outlined on Nautilusarchiv.html, the value of systematics is often underappreciated for bacteria and viruses. These are the most populous organisms on Earth, although more than 99% of bacteria have yet to be cultivated.
Naming and characterizing different species of bacteria, and the investigation of the relationships between them, is an important adjunct to genomics-based approaches, which are producing ever-increasing estimates of the numbers and types of these organisms.
Jean Euzeby, the IJSEM list editor, maintains a web resource that details all those species that have been ratified by an international committee. Links to this and other useful resources and websites are provided in the Nautilus post.
Nature 456, xiii; 13 November 2008.