Nautilus

Philip Ball's column in news@nature.com this week is about Richard Doll, and whether he should have stated in his publications that he received consultancy fees. The Nature journals' policy on competing interests is summarized here. As ever, we welcome comments from scientists about the practice of declaring such interests, whether financial, ethical or personal, in published papers. How relevant are any or all of these conflicts to the strength of the scientific conclusions reported in a peer-reviewed paper? In particular, we welcome feedback about our own policy, via comments to this post.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 19, 2006
Categories: Competing interests, Policies | Permalink | Comments (0)

Q. Dear Editor
My collaborators and I just submitted a paper to Nature. We would like to know whether we can send the present paper on the physics arxiv web site (see for example xxx.lanl.gov) or if -- to respect Nature policy-- we should wait for the editorial decision.

A. Dear Author

Thank you for your message. It would be fine for you to send your preprint to the arxiv site, or any other recognised community preprint server. Please provide the arxiv reference number to the editor handling your paper for his/her information, though.

Our policy is here:

"Contributions submitted to, in press with or published in Nature must not be posted on any web site, except for preprints posted on recognized preprint servers (such as ArXiv) where this is community practice. The server concerned must be identified to the editor in the cover letter accompanying submission of the paper, and the content of the paper must not be advertised to the media by virtue of being on the preprint server, as explained fully in Nature."

Best wishes
Nature.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 18, 2006
Categories: Access, Policies, Policies Feedback | Permalink | Comments (2)

This week's Nature devotes its entire News Feature section to the topic of laboratory animals, with articles about Nature's poll to find out what scientists really think about the use of animals in research; attitudes to research on primates; and the implications of the expected explosion in the number of mice used in experiments, as mouse disease models proliferate and are refined. All these features, and more, are collected in a special web focus. Join the discussion of these pieces and the reaction to them in the news blog .

The Nature journals' policy on publication of work that involves research on anmial subjects can be seen at this link. We welcome your views on this publication policy in the comments to this post.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 15, 2006
Categories: Animal experiments | Permalink | Comments (0)

In today's Nature, Masao Ito and Thorsten Wiesel of the Human Frontier Science Program write in Correspondence about the lack of international visibility of many Japanese scientists, in that they are very difficult to find by search engines and indeed in publication databases. (The full text of the Correspondence is on the continuation sheet of this post.)
As a consequence, scientists in Japan and in other non-English speaking countries are less likely to be invited to participate in collaborative projects or to become reviewers, which deprives them of a full international experience.

The Correspondence authors advise scientists to construct internationally comprehensible web pages to make a scientist’s research interests, research group and publications immediately clear to anyone who visits the site. The homepage of such institutional websites must provide a clear option headed ‘research’, in the English language, that leads to a page summarizing the research in a style familiar to international visitors.

In many regions of the world, numerous scientists have similar or identical family names and initials, making literature searches in PubMed very difficult or impossible. Some concerted effort is necessary to resolve this problem — perhaps by the addition of laboratory codes, or a ‘zip code’ for the initials of individual scientists — to allow these scientists to compete fairly on the international level.

We welcome suggestions from readers, which can be made by writing a comment to this post.

Continue reading "Web visibility" »

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 14, 2006
Categories: Communication | Permalink | Comments (6)

In tomorrow's Nature (14 December issue), Bernard Rupp suggests in Correspondence that peer-reviewers can judge the quality of structures by using the "RSCC" plot, rather than requiring the full coordinates. Prof Rupp says: "Generated as a part of validation during structure deposition, these plots can be produced without any additional work by authors. The plots can be provided with the manuscript or as supplemental material to convince reviewers of the model quality in critical areas, without forcing authors to reveal coordinates and structure factors prematurely."
Nature welcomes comments and opinions from authors and readers about the suggestion to make provision of RSCC plots mandatory at the submission stage. Please let us know your views in the comments section to this post.
Prof Rupp's letter is reproduced in the full version of this post.

Continue reading "RSCC plots" »

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 13, 2006
Categories: Data availability | Permalink | Comments (1)

Nature Publishing Group has joined with other leading science publishers to develop a web portal called OARE (online access to research in the environment). The project provides countries in the developing world with free or reduced cost access to the scholarly environmental record, and is modelled on the HINARI and AGORA projects for health and agricultural communities, respectively, in which NPG is already a partner.

The United Nations Environment Programme, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization , Cornell and Yale universities are developing the OARE portal with the publishers. Yale university, for example, is contributing grants of $500,000. Its OARE activities are directed by Oswald Schmitz, professor of population and community ecology and associate dean of academic affairs for the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and Ann Okerson, associate university librarian for collections and international programs. As with HINARI and AGORA, Yale University library will provide much of the infrastructure for the OARE portal, via its collection of journals

OARE will use information and communication technologies, digitized global scientific information, and a creative public-private partnership to fulfill the information needs of environmental scientists in the developing world.

Further information can be found in this article by Maurice Long, publisher coordinator of these three projects.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 13, 2006
Categories: Access, Partners | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over a hundred leading members of the Australasian scientific community attended a party to celebrate the inaugural Nature awards for scientific mentoring in Australia at the ScienceWorks Museum in Melbourne on Friday 1 December.

Tom Healy, a colloidal chemist at The University of Melbourne, won the lifetime achievement award, and Rachel Webster, an astrophysicist at the same institution, was the mid-career awardee. The response of the audience, as well as the very strong field of over 70 excellent nominated candidates, demonstrates the recognition the awards have quickly gained in Australia. See here for Nature's press release announcing these awards.

Information and news about the Nature mentoring awards can be seen at the journal's website, at http://www.nature.com/nature/nestaawards.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 11, 2006
Categories: Author services, Awards | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is much comment in Nature and elsewhere this week about the two fraudulent stem-cell papers published in and retracted from the journal Science. Science's editors commissioned an external committee to report on its handling of the papers, in the light of which the journal is likely to begin extra scrutiny for "high risk" papers. For more details, see Nature's news story in the current issue (vol 444, pp 658-659; 7 December 2006), and this special feature.

Other opinions about the panel's report can be seen in a statement by Don Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief of Science, at the journal's website; at the weblog Nobel Intent; and in The Scientist's online news service. The report itself can be seen here.

Inevitably, much of the discussion centres on the role of journals and peer-reviewers in their combined ability to detect fabricated results. Everyone would agree that published papers have to be entirely above suspicion. But what of the authors' perspective -- how much data, methodology or calculation is necessary to provide a convincing case for a conclusion? Especially in fast-moving fields such as stem-cell research, how much time and effort is needed to accumulate such evidence and submit it to a journal -- a journal that may have to decline 90 per cent of submitted papers?

The Nature journals' policies on data availability can be seen here. As we scrutinize these policies in the light of current events, we welcome suggestions from authors, past, present or future, as to what you believe to be reasonable for a journal to demand to ensure that conclusions are solid. Please make your suggestions in the comments to this posting.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 08, 2006
Categories: Data availability, Policies | Permalink | Comments (0)

Welcome to Nautilus, Nature Publishing Group's discussion forum for all our authors --- past, present and future. On this blog we will be providing advice about getting your work published in our journals, and providing information about our author services.

You can contact us either directly by email or by commenting on any of the posts here. Either way, your message will be read by an editor at a Nature journal, and we'll reply to you, either directly or via the blog.

Who are we? I am Maxine Clarke, an editor at Nature , and I will be doing most of the posting here for the time being, as well as reading your emails and comments. My colleague Linda Miller, US executive editor of Nature and executive editor of the Nature monthly journals publishing primary research, will also be posting occasionally (I hope!).

Once again, welcome to your Nature Publishing Group community blog -- we look forward to many future interactions with you.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 07, 2006
Categories: General | Permalink | Comments (0)