Archive by category | Publishing

Comment threads on PLoS One

Comment threads on PLoS One

Deepak and Cameron both have interesting posts up that analyse the comments, notes and ratings left at PLoS One since inception. Making this data available was a cool thing for PLoS to do as they’re one of the few publishers / journals taking a serious stab at implementing commenting properly (Highwire’s BMJ and BioMedCentral being others. And us, of course, shortly ). Bora sent us the data too. I got caught up in other stuff and didn’t have time to analyze the dataset by the agreed date, but now I’m thinking that was actually a good thing as there’s some  … Read more

Wikiwikiwah

Wikiwikiwah

We’re launching a new wiki experiment this afternoon, driven by staff at Nature Reviews Genetics. The September ‘08 issue of NRG includes a new paper from ’https://www.nodalpoint.org/2007/08/06/scifoo_day_3_genome_voyeurism_with_lincoln_stein’>bioinformatics hero Lincoln Stein, describing the “cyberinfrastructure” of databases, protocols and services that is becoming more and more necessary for life science research as large scale datasets become common. We wanted the supplemental information for the paper (which lists different web services, databases, tools and initiatives) to be like a public database so that readers had the ability to add new information, revise out of date descriptions and remove broken links, so with Lincoln’s  … Read more

Indelible Ink

Indelible Ink

Considerable time and effort goes into producing print copies of journals, both here at Nature and at other scientific publishers. It’s something that pains my web publishing heart. Is print really necessary? Do the benefits outweigh the costs? If they do, are those benefits to consumers… or really just to us publishers? If we dropped print altogether could the savings fund a free bar at the next NPG xmas party? Certainly print still has the edge over online in some situations. I’m a recent convert to the print version of Nature journal – it’s far easier to browse bitty front  … Read more

A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st century

Sara Lloyd from Pan Macmillan (one of Nature’s sister companies) is serializing on The Digitalist blog an article that she wrote for Library Trends, ‘A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st century’. I’ve already had the pleasure of seeing the whole thing, and can only say that you should definitely read it.  Read more

What’s in your nature.com?

Inspired by that famous Bio-Rad ad, Scientists for Better PCR (more of which Jenny Rohn blogged about on Nature Network), some of us have launched the It’s in my nature.com competition. It’s in my nature.com is the latest incarnation of the NPG group on Facebook, previously Nurture by Nature – Invaluable info for postgrad scientists and medics. (I did not chose these names.)  … Read more