A History of Nature
In a wonderful marriage of antiquity and technology, Nature has just released a special website about its history. Browse the timeline and watch the videos, then nominate and vote for your favourite Nature papers. (Mine are here and here, but I urge you to vote for this one. Read more
Thomas Vander Wal Visits Nature
Last Friday we welcomed Thomas “Folksonomy” Vander Wal to Nature. We spoke about various areas of join interest, including of course tagging and social software. Thomas was also kind enough to give a talk to assembled staff. Here are my impressionistic and rather inadequate notes from that session. Read more
PRISM: Publishers’ and Researchers’ Intensifying Sense of Mistrust
For anyone who’s interested here is Nature Publishing Group’s (NPG’s) take on PRISM: Although 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 (from submitting manuscripts to PubMed Central on behalf of our authors to establishing Nature Precedings), and our policies are already compliant with the proposed NIH mandate. Read more
My Daughter’s DNA, Google Sky, and Reinventing Academic Publishing
Here’s a summary of some way-cool things that have passed my way lately, especially following SciFoo. Read more
Amazon: A New Kind of Publisher
While most of the attention and ire of the publishing industry seems to be trained on Google these days, the most clueful colleagues I speak with appear unanimous in the view that the biggest threat to their livelihoods is actually Amazon. I think they’re right, as this recent announcement shows. It may just prove to be the publishing news of the decade. Read more
SciFoo: The Podcast
Just in case you haven’t already ODed on SciFoo blog coverage — or perhaps you have but a touch of audio will come as welcome relief — the 16 August episode of the Nature Podcast has a great segment on the event narrated by my colleague, Adam Rutherford. Listen here. (If you’re impatient then fast-forward to 21 minutes in, but don’t miss the celebrity endorsement at 1:29.) … Read more
ETech Call For Participation
My favourite conference of the year, ETech (OK, perhaps I’m excluding certain invitation-only ‘unconferences’) has opened its CFP. Wey hey! And there’s more: Due to what I can only assume was a rare administrative mix-up at O’Reilly, I’ve also found myself on this year’s program committee. w00t! Read more
Science Foo Camp 2007
Everyone else is writing about it, so it’s probably about time that I did too. SciFoo ‘07 was wonderfully intense, mind-expanding and surreal. Organisationally, it was a bit less stressful than last year’s inaugural event (at least for me), mainly because we knew it was going to work to some degree. Indeed, the success of SciFoo ‘06 lead to a fair amount of anticipation this year, best described in words by Jonathan Eisen and in pictures by Pierre Lindenbaum. (See also Pierre’s cartoons from the event itself.) Such is the variety and (relative) anarchy of the event that there’s no … Read more
Bill McCoy (Adobe) and Mike Culver (Amazon) visit Nature
Last Friday we had the pleasure of welcoming Bill McCoy, General Manager of e-Publishing Business at Adobe Systems, to speak about their next-generation digital publishing technologies. Read more