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

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

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