Nautilus

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 and communicators. Readers are welcome to join any of these discussions by visiting the links provided. The Nature Network week column is archived here.

Ruth Wilson is going to Istanbul later this month to give a talk at the Equal Opportunities Conference. She'll speak about the steps she and her colleagues at the UK Resource Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology have taken to help women scientists connect online. To gather information for her talk, she asks Nature Network users for their views and experience of whether blogging, twittering, and other social media help women’s careers in science, engineering, technology. Is this male-dominated area any less so in online environments? Are there online facilities or developments that would help women wanting to start/develop their careers? Ruth welcomes your views at the Women in Science forum (views from men are as welcome as those from women).

Do we need a scientific literature? The answer might seem obvious, but Bob O'Hara gets to the basics of "why we consider peer-reviewed research so important". It's a very well-argued post, covering access to the literature itself and to what it says once you have access to it. Unusually for a blog post, a diverse range of commenters broadly agree with it, in a discussion of a range of "accessibility" issues. Please join in.

Cath Ennis gets to grips with the writing style itself. "It began with the phrase “The human genome is a motley harlequin”, and became even more eccentric as it progressed. It was wonderful stuff. I loved it. But I knew I couldn’t use it. A little part of me died as I took out my red pen and rewrote his words in a more conventional academic style." Read on at Cath's blog post 'Resistance is futile', which refers to Jennifer Rohn's stimulating post about "the untold narrative of the precise dryness of scientific papers".

The writing process will be further dissected at Second Life on Tuesday (7 July), where visitors can join Tom Levenson, professor of science writing at MIT, who will be talking about his new book, Newton and the Counterfeiters. Professor Levenson will be taking questions from the audience on the book, his career as a writer, or anything else. See Joanna Scott's blog for more details of the event itself and of how to set up an account on Second Life.

Dara Sosulski picks up a bit of pseudoscientific news education, in a week when the sixth World Conference of Science Journalists has been putting science news reporting in the spotlight. There's a discussion in the Nature Opinion forum about Nature' s special issue to accompany the conference - a collection of articles ranging from the evolution of the science journalist from cheerleader to watchdog, to how blogging by audiences at scientific conferences is challenging traditional newspaper reporting. Another aspect of science journalism - scaremongering - was at the heart of the most recent Boston "Skeptics in the pub" meeting, explosively described by Robert Pinsonneault.

Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Planet Nature
Nature.com's science blogs index and tracker
Nature Publishing Group news at Nature Network

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 03, 2009
Categories: Nature Network round-up | Permalink | Comments (0)

This month's (July) Nature Chemical Biology includes two articles describing how access to the highest quality chemical probes will ensure their prominent position in the biological and drug discovery toolboxes.
Aled M Edwards, Chas Bountra, David J Kerr and Timothy M Willson, in their Commentary (Nature Chemical Biology 5, 436 - 440; 2009) Open access chemical and clinical probes to support drug discovery, say that drug discovery resources in academia and industry are not used efficiently, to the detriment of industry and society. Duplication could be reduced and productivity increased, they write, by performing basic biology and clinical proofs of concept within open access industry-academia partnerships. Chemical biologists could play a central role in this effort.
The authors' main argument is that the development of new medicines is being hindered by the way in which academia and industry advance innovative targets. By generating freely available chemical and clinical probes and performing open-access science, the overall system will produce a wider range of clinically validated targets for the same total resource, arguably the most effective way to spur the development of treatments for unmet needs.
In a related article in the same issue of the journal, 'A crowdsourcing evaluation of the NIH chemical probes', Tudor I. Opera et al. (Nature Chemical Biology 5, 441-447; 2009) write that between 2004 and 2008, the US National Institutes of Health Molecular Libraries and Imaging initiative pilot phase funded 10 high-throughput screening centres, resulting in the deposition of 691 assays into PubChem and the nomination of 64 chemical probes. The authors 'crowdsourced' the Molecular Libraries and Imaging initiative output to 11 experts, who expressed medium or high levels of confidence in 48 of these 64 probes. Crowdsourcing is a cross-disciplinary alternative way to assess confidence for both chemical probes and drug leads: it pools multiple levels of expertise from translational disciplines, providing a rigorous chemical-probe evaluation process.

Nature Chemical Biology website.
Nature Chemical Biology guide to authors.
Nature Chemical Biology focuses and supplements.
Nature Chemical Biology symposium 2009: Chemical biology in drug discovery.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 02, 2009
Categories: Access, Data availability, Disciplines | Permalink | Comments (0)

This year is turning out to be an interesting one for research funding in the UK. Everyone wants the best science to be funded, but it's not clear that the proposed policy changes will achieve this. So begins the July Editorial in Nature Materials (8, 535; 2009), entitled Value for money.
In April, the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) introduced a policy intended to reduce the burden on those who referee the grant proposals by refusing to allow resubmissions of rejected submissions within 12 months. The reaction of angry researchers included a petition to government, and forced the EPSRC to amend the policy, though the basic premise remains. (See Peer to Peer for more details). Nature Materials asks whether this regulation will curtail new avenues of thought. "Researchers may shy away from more exploratory proposals in case failure prevents future applications for grants to extend established work...... X-ray and magnetic resonance imaging stem from fundamental physics research. The question arises as to whether this research would have been funded within the current system, but more importantly, it demonstrates the need to keep supporting blue-sky research."
How much is the UK government meddling with the science and research that it supports?, asks the Editorial. "The research councils have been asked to collectively generate £106 million of efficiency savings that will be put back into research. The Minister of State for Science and Innovation, Lord Drayson, asserted that the research councils themselves should decide how. The Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills stated: "The councils will be developing plans...to refocus their research programmes...into new priority areas such as the green economy (and) life sciences. Bearing in mind that the research councils have to describe how they distribute their funds to the government, it would seem unwise for the research councils to 'save' money by directing funds away from these priority areas."
Research councils, including the EPSRC and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), now require an economic impact plan to be included in each application. The opportunity to mention any likely economic outcomes was already present, but the new plan makes a more formal presentation obligatory. "Materials research is in a better position than most areas — for many materials scientists it is relatively simple to imagine a route from their basic research to practical applications that can affect society. It is therefore easy for the government to justify spending on these areas. A danger is that if expectations are not met, questions will be asked, even if a whole new branch of research has been discovered along the way. This could be perceived as lying to the tax-payer and ultimately worsen government and public perception......To reap the economic growth that the government believes science will provide, instead of debating the details, a significant increase in overall levels of research funding is needed."

Nature Materials journal website.
Nature Materials guide to authors.
Nature Materials on Twitter

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 01, 2009
Categories: Support | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are many different criteria that can be taken into account when judging the scientific success of individual researchers, but are some more meaningful than others? Nature Chemistry in its July Editorial (1, 251; 2009) is the latest to address this perennial question. (See, for example, this Nature Network forum on citation use and abuse.)
Nature Chemistry points out that the "basic currency of scientific communication is the journal article, and so it seems sensible to use this as a starting point for evaluating success in a given area. At first glance, this is a particularly attractive approach because we can boil down an individual's publication record to cold hard numbers. For example, we can count how many papers someone has to their name and we can also count the number of times a specific article has been cited — or indeed how much an individual's complete body of work has been cited. Moreover, the rise of the internet has made finding these numbers a fairly trivial task. But can we make meaningful comparisons?"
The Editorial identifies the fallacy of using journal 'impact factors' for this purpose, as well as flaws in alternative metrics that have been devised. Other suggested 'success measures' include the amount of funding a scientist can attract, recognition of peers (for example prizes and awards), and education.
Nature Chemistry: journal homepage.
About Nature Chemistry.
Nature Chemistry guide to authors.
Previous Nautilus posts on quality measures.
Previous Nautilus posts on citation analysis.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 30, 2009
Categories: Quality measures | Permalink | Comments (0)

Inhibition of the replicative cycle of hepatitis C virus
Richard Bethell, George Kukolj and Peter W. White
Nature Reviews Microbiology, June 2009.
It is estimated that 170 million people globally are infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV). Chronic HCV infection can result in the development of liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma, and therefore represents a substantial public health problem. Current drugs against HCV have poor safety profiles and limited effectiveness, especially against HCV genotype 1. As a result, there is considerable interest in identifying specific inhibitors of HCV replication that could be used either as an adjunct to current therapy or in place of it. A free poster from Nature Reviews Microbiology summarizes the replicative cycle of HCV and the principal targets for specific antiviral agents that are currently being developed.

Download a high-resolution PDF of the poster here.
Further reading (PDF).
Nature Reviews Microbiology website.
A guide to Nature Reviews Microbiology.
About the journal.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 29, 2009
Categories: Disciplines, NPG special content | Permalink | Comments (0)

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 and communicators. Readers are welcome to join any of these discussions by visiting the links provided. The Nature Network week column is archived here.

Registration is now open for the Science Online London 09 conference this summer. Act soon if you would like to attend, as there are only 150 places, 100 of which have already gone. A list of the attendees (so far) is here. The organizers have been collecting ideas for topics for discussion over the past few weeks, and will be announcing the programme soon.

Branwen Hide was asked the other day how she would set up a research base in the UK if she could start with a blank slate. She passes the question to Nature Network readers: "If you had ultimate power what would you do? If you want you can start now and talk about changes you would make and things you would like to see." Visit the UK science policy forum to add your answer! (Mine is there.) Moving from the UK to the US, Michael Nestor says that we need a national consortium of science, and for universities to be parallel distributed processors. Read on, and contribute.

Maria Nowotny, a researcher in materials science, enjoys peer-reviewing papers and acting as a guest editor for journals - so much so that she's interested in an editing career. An online discussion follows of the qualifications and experience needed for this role.

If you're a scientist who writes, and you like travelling to the remotest of places, Steffi Suhr rounds up current opportunities to visit the Antarctic, complete with insider tips.

How do you fit 4,000 years of science into 400 pages? Historians of science call this the Big Picture problem, and now Patricia Fara has provided the first ever solution – Science: A Four Thousand Year History (Oxford University Press). In a Second Life talk on Tuesday 30 June, she discusses three of the Big Questions she had to confront while she was writing her book – When did science begin? Who did science? How does science change? Some of her answers may be unexpected. More details are here. You may have difficulty attending if you are in Australia, unfortunately, as Craig Rowell reports censorship plans.

Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Planet Nature
Nature.com's science blogs index and tracker
Nature Publishing Group news at Nature Network

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 26, 2009
Categories: Nature Network round-up | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Biotechnology's June issue contains several articles of particular interest to scientists as communicators, authors and entrepreneurs. Here are a few highlights:

Nature Biotechnology 27, 514 - 518 (2009).
Science communication reconsidered.
Tania Bubela et al.
As new media proliferate and the public's trust and engagement in science are influenced by industry involvement in academic research, an interdisciplinary workshop provides some recommendations to enhance science communication. Among these are that graduate students need to be taught about the social and political context of science and how to communicate with the media and a diversity of publics; that the factors contributing to media hype and errors (largely of omission) are explicitly recognized to allow science institutions and media organizations informed communication policies; research on science communication should be expanded to include online and digital media; more investment in the systematic tracking of news and cultural indicators, including traditional news outlets but also radio, entertainment TV, religious media, the web and new documentary genres; and a new 'science policy' beat in journalism courses to fill in the gaps between the technical backgrounders preferred by science writers and the conflict emphasis of political reporters. Finally, the authors argue, if there is a major threat to science journalism, it is that science journalists are losing their jobs at for-profit news organizations; new models of support for science journalism are needed, in which online digital formats blend professional reporting with user-generated content and discussion.

Nature Biotechnology 27, 528-530 (2009):
Maters of their universe.
Genentech—the biotech venture that launched a thousand companies—is no longer its own master. In March, majority stakeholder Roche reached an agreement with the South San Francisco, California–based company under which the Swiss drug maker would take over the biotech for $46.8 billion. But many remember those first years when a small team of bright, intellectually disciplined young scientists—often rowdy and personally eccentric people—got the company up and running. Randy Osborne and Laura DeFrancesco caught up with a few of those pioneers to talk about that era, their time and how they felt leading the charge.

Nature Biotechnology 27, 531 - 537 (2009).
Wasting cash—the decline of the British biotech sector.
Graham Smith, Muhammad Safwan Akram, Keith Redpath & William Bains
Undercapitalization and overgenerous boardroom compensation for management have been major contributors to the poor performance of UK biotech. Despite historic leadership in European biotech, the UK's industry has suffered a near collapse in the past two years and now has little private or public investment and no candidates for world-class companies. Why do shareholders allow UK public biotech companies to accumulate top management that pays itself so much, is unmotivated to drive shareholder value and as a consequence apparently drains the company of resources, notably cash? These questions, and others, are addressed in the feature.

Nature Biotechnology website.
Nature Biotechnology guide to authors.
Nature Biotechnology conference programme.
Nature Biotechnology focuses and supplements.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 25, 2009
Categories: Authorship, Conferences, Education, Ethics, Public and media, Publications | Permalink | Comments (0)