This weekly Nautilus column highlights some of the online discussion at Nature Network in the preceding week that is of relevance to scientists as authors.
The Nature Network week column is archived here.
An early collaboration between academics and industry is revealed in Scott Keir's news article. In a unique collaboration between crystallographers and designers, the story of Festival of Britain's Pattern Group is told for the first time at the Wellcome Collection’s London exhibition From Atoms to Patterns, which runs till 10 August. All but one of the contemporary (1950s) crystallographers took part anonymously and are unmasked here for the first time. “It does seem to have been perceived as a risk to venture outside academia—and to associate with trade and commerce”, comments co-curator Emily Jo Sargent.
Charles Darwin continues his assessment of science as discussed in the media, this time turning his attention to television. So far as the UK terrestrial channels are concerned, he found one factual science programme in 6 days, stimulating some acerbic comments, for "what now appears is – if I may coin a phrase – parascience. It does not deal with the raw work of our noble trade, but its applied results in society and the environment."
The University of Rockefeller Press, publisher of Journal of Cell Biology and other journals, has joined the publishers who no longer ask authors of research papers for copyright. The new policy is highlighted by Richard Grant at his blog The Scientist, and there is a comment thread that includes clarification of Nature Publishing Group's licence to publsh policies. And at Nature Precedings forum, the discussion of search, self-archiving, citations and "findability" started last week, continues apace.
Some journals apparently send unsolicited emails to authors asking them to submit their manuscripts. This practice is discussed at Gobbledygook blog, particularly in relation to open-access journals. The blog's author, Martin Fenner, advises potential authors so approached to "first check whether the journal (if it is a biomedical journal) is indexed in Medline and either has a reasonable impact factor or (for new journals) receives enough citations" before deciding whether to submit a manuscript.
Many journals do not approach potential authors in this way. Senior Nature editor Henry Gee addresses the question of Editors and the Research Agenda at his blog End of the Pier Show, in a post stimulated by Pedro Belatro's comment: "I also would like to see editors having a stronger say in the research agenda. They spend so much time reading, researching and deciding what should be interesting for a certain community, why not be more vocal about their ideas?" Henry writes: "What editors don’t do is go on the stump, making general statements about the specific subjects they’d like to see papers cover, and what they don’t like. There are many good reasons for this. The first is that all papers are welcome, simply because some of the most important papers are the most unexpected. Another, I think, is that to be too specific about what sort of things we like is to throw the game of science: editors aren’t in the business of shaping science, they are there to select the best papers for their journals. The two are not mutually exclusive, but they are distinct."
In a previous post, Henry tackles another topic of perennial interest: science careers and sexism. In commissioning a series of scientific profiles for Nature, Henry writes: "I scrupulously invited as many women as men to participate, so it was a surprise to me to learn (as perhaps it should not have been) that women featured disproportionately rarely in the published result." He goes on to question why this should be.
While on the subject of careers and training, debate continues at the News and Opinion forum on education: are we training too many scientists? ; and what's the value of molecular evolution training? Michael Thain, a UK biology school teacher writes: I have long lamented the almost complete lack of any developmental biology, certainly of non-human animals, in school biology. Indeed, as my colleagues are keen to complain, it is difficult at present to see how any school biology student can appreciate from their studies that there is a biosphere filled with non-humans. Extraordinary, isn’t it? And disgraceful." Please join us there to provide your views on these provocative Nature Commentaries.
Finally, at the Good Paper Journal club group, now numbering more than 100 members, the topic of definition of error bars is currently under the microscope.
Previous Nature Network columns
