Nautilus

What’s so wonderful about citations? asks Cambridge professor Peter Murray-Rust. Prof Murray-Rust has looked on Google Scholar for a paper which according to the publisher has more than 100,000 accesses, and found that it has 92 citations over the same period, which translates into one citation for every 1,000 (or so) downloads.
Prof Murray-Rust applied the same logic to himself. He was told by a publisher that his paper had been downloaded 6,000 times, so expected to find about 6 citations on Google Scholar -- but in the event found only one. "I’m not saying there are better ways - there probably aren’t", he writes. "If we make downloads a metric, then people will try to distort them. But let’s not take this [citation analysis] as seriously as we do."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 31, 2007
Categories: Citation analysis, Quality measures | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is a succinct and useful post at the addictive FemaleScienceProfessor blog entitled "The First Two Lines", in which FSP advises a student on how to give a good presentation.

"When my students are preparing presentations for conferences, I always tell them that the first 2-3 lines are particularly critical and I want them to think carefully about how they will introduce the talk. After the first few lines, the rest of a talk is typically straightforward (data, interpretation, conclusions), but the first few lines are where you either grab the audience or you don't. This is when you lay out why the work is interesting and important, and why anyone should care about the rest of what you have to say. In fact, it's a lot like writing a proposal."

Read the rest of the advice here. If you are inexperienced or unsure about giving a scientific presentation, or indeed writing a paper, I think you'll find it very helpful. Certainly the student who received the advice found it so, according to the comments to FSP's blog post.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 30, 2007
Categories: Careers, Communication | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Let's see: plane ticket, sun block, toothbrush, mp3 player – you are all set for a summer break. Wait, some reading? Well, here comes the dilemma between the latest page-turner and the pile of research article PDFs on your desk. Why not compromise and pack a good popular science book?" So starts the July editorial in Nature Methods (4, 535; 2007), aptly entitled "summer reading". What follows is an eclectic sample of the editors' reading lists. If you have some favourites to add, please do so at Methagora, the Nature Methods blog, which also carries an extended list of "staff picks".

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 27, 2007
Categories: General, Public and media, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Scientists tend to complain that Congress rarely pays heed to what they have to say. But the issues are often as much about values as they are science, says David Goldston in his monthly Nature column Party of One (Nature 448, 119; 2007) .

"For many US scientists, the demise of the OTA [Office of Technlogy Assessment] has taken on inordinate symbolic significance. Scientists often suggest that in eliminating the agency, Congress chose a path of wilful ignorance that has led to poor decisions over the past decade. But has the absence of the OTA really hampered policy-making? Not particularly. Congress is awash with information provided by scientific groups, and it still formally seeks scientific guidance — particularly from the National Academies, which arguably have more prestige and credibility on Capitol Hill than the OTA had. And reports from the academies can make a difference. For example, the 2006 report on the palaeoclimate record, specifically on the 'hockey-stick' graph (see Nature 441, 1032–1033; 2006), helped quieten congressional debate over whether recent decades have been unusually warm.
Other reports have been equally prominent, if less decisive. The academies' 2002 report on fuel-economy standards has become the bible on that subject, although, like the Bible, it is quoted by all sides. That's partly because of the report itself — it concluded, for example, that the standards had cost lives in the past but that, because of new technology, they needn't in the future — but it is also because scientific information does not usually point ineluctably to a single conclusion on policy.
Policy-making needs to be informed by both science and values. Is stem-cell research ethical? That's not a science question, although one needs to understand the potential of stem-cell research to answer it. Should clean-air standards be strengthened? That is not a science question, but one needs to know what researchers think the health impacts of dirtier air would be."

See here for the full article (subscription or site licence required).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 26, 2007
Categories: Communication, Education, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

The July issue of Molecular Systems Biology, NPG's open access journal published in partnership with EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organisation), is live. This month's featured article is Systematic evaluation of objective functions for predicting intracellular fluxes in Escherichia coli, by Robert Schuetz, Lars Kuepfer & Uwe Sauer (Molecular Systems Biology 3, 119; 2007), with an accompanying News and Views article by Jens Nielsen (Molecular Systems Biology 3, 126; 2007). See the journal's home page for more research papers, News and Views, Perspectives and Editorials, as well as links to systems biology papers published in the Nature journals.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 25, 2007
Categories: Access, Publications | Permalink | Comments (0)

Open Access as a model for the future? So writes Evelyn Harvey in a news report at Nature Network. Is open access publishing an unstoppable force? Does it face immovable objects in the shape of publication costs, quality control and copyright? These were questions addressed by the third Lonon open research conference last month.
The successes of open access were highlighted by some speakers: it makes research available without access barriers or subscription costs. BioMedCentral and others believe they have shown that it can be a strong publishing business model. There were also various demonstrations of personalised readership profiles that can be created using metrics such as number of times a paper is downloaded.
The problems include the removal of the main source of income for scientific societies, and a possible compromise in quality via self-publication and inadequate review.
Evelyn writes that most delegates agreed that open access is here to stay, but that big challenges lay ahead. As one researcher said when confronted with the copyright risks: “My problem isn’t plagiarism, it’s obscurity!”.
Nature's two extensive debates on access to the literature, including commissioned articles from a range of perspectives, can be read here (free access!).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 24, 2007
Categories: Access | Permalink | Comments (0)

Clarity and obfuscation in scientific papers is the title of a post by Dr Free-Ride (a.k.a. philosophy professor Janet Stemwedel). The post isn't as dry as it may seem from its title, as it draws attention to this list of common statements in scientific writing, and what they really mean. Examples are along the lines of:

"It is generally believed that"
I think this and at least one other person agrees with me.

"Additional work will be required to elucidate the mechanism"
I don't have a clue what is going on and I'm not going to be the one to figure it out.

While acknowledging the humour in the list, Dr Free-Ride asks why some people use words "whose meaning is distant from the truth" in their scientific writing, and how this relates to the "reward structure" for scientists.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 23, 2007
Categories: Writing | Permalink | Comments (1)

The July Editorial in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology (14, 569; 2007) reports on an interesting and diverse Cold Spring Harbor meeting on "clocks and rhythms" that reminds us of the importance of supporting basic science research.

From the editorial: "many presentations began with an image of the Earth seen from space, half shrouded in nocturnal shadow (no, this wasn't a sci-fi convention). Another unusual feature was the curious mix of scientists—biochemists, microbiologists, fly and mouse geneticists, plant biologists, neurobiologists, clinical researchers—all mingling and discussing their work. Even for a seasoned conference-attending editor, this was quite a remarkable gathering.

Read on at the NSMB journal page.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 23, 2007
Categories: Communication, Publications | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chemist Jean-Claude Bradley, a friend of Nautilus's comments section, writes a post on Useful Chemistry blog about indexing molecules in Second Life

He writes: "As I've recently commented, there has been media interest in the use of the virtual online world Second Life for chemistry. We also recently demonstrated on Drexel Island that it was possible to visualize molecular docking using the molecular rezzer developed by Andrew Lang.
Nature Island [Second Nature is Nature's island in Second Life] also hosts several common molecules, including buckyballs. As more people start to experiment with representing chemicals and chemistry research in Second Life it would be nice if such examples were discovered by a simple Google search."

Check out the rest of the post, contribute to Prof Bradley's collaborative wiki "molecule indexing" project if you can (which seems to be working, from the comments to the Useful Chemistry post) --- and maybe even take a trip to Second Life.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 20, 2007
Categories: Partners, Public and media, Publications, Publishing | Permalink | Comments (1)

Kevin Davies, the founding editor of Nature Genetics, recalls the perfect storm of events and personalities that governed the launch of the journal 15 years ago and its formative years. The journal offered a high-profile forum for the genetics community—and a bold new direction for what is now Nature Publishing Group.

The then editor of Nature, John Maddox [now Sir John Maddox], whose presence in the London office was evident by the pall of cigarette smoke billowing from his corner cubicle, frequently enjoyed thumbing through stacks of rejected manuscripts to see what Nature was turning away. In particular, the ALS rejection perplexed him. "We are, after all, in the publishing business," he reminded the biology team, and exhorted us to always consider the broader public interest in our decisions. He even coined a name for it—"the David Niven factor"—after the debonair British actor who had died of the disease. Of course, Nature was never intended to be the forum for publishing mundane mendelian linkage papers, but we smartly heeded the boss's advice, and at least one more was published following his intervention: the mapping of the gene for Werner syndrome. More importantly, however, Maddox had highlighted the quality of many genetics papers that Nature couldn't accommodate—and the tantalizing possibilities, should we seek to publish more of them.

Read more of the story of how Nature Genetics began in the Editorial of the July issue of the journal (Nature Genetics 39, 805-806; 2007).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 20, 2007
Categories: Publications | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a post entitled Copy-Editing and Citation-Linking , Michael Jubb of the Research Information Network compares the version of an article finalised by the author, and the version edited by the journal. An extract is provided here:

"Two recent articles in Learned Publishing, the journal published by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), have highlighted the issue. The first, by Wates and Campbell, looked at the changes made in copy-editing in articles published in a series of Blackwell journals. The second, by Goodman, Dowson and Yaremchuk, is in the current issue of Learned Publishing, but also, interestingly, through the University of Arizona’s repository. I have not tried to compare the two versions. It would be interesting to do so, not least because they found that as a result of publishers’ copy-editing “there were a number of differences between author-final and published versions that were ‘confusing’ and that sometimes the publisher version and sometimes the author version was the more confusing”.......
In an editorial ....Sally Morris also comments on the two articles, and lays considerable stress on the value that the publisher adds in the checking and formatting of references and the provision of citation linking via CrossRef..... the need to add DOI links is a relatively new one which I gather relatively few authors actually do themselves (and I was not guided so to do by the publishers of either of my recent articles)."
See here for the full article.
We would be interested to hear further feedback from authors about the editing and web services they received from Nature journals and NPG journals, to add to the regular "author experience" surveys we conduct.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 19, 2007
Categories: Author services, Citation analysis, Communication | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Functional Glycomics Gateway is a one-stop online resource designed to keep you in touch with the latest and hottest research in glycobiology, brought to you by Nature Publishing Group in collaboration with the Consortium for Functional Glycomics (CFG). Below we highlight a selection of what's new this month.
Featured Articles
Each month we showcase two exciting new glycobiology articles from the current literature. Nature Publishing Group papers are available free for 3 months and the Editor's reviews are free indefinitely.
Intracellular glycosylation: A QUICtag for GlcNAc
A new combination of tagging, isotope labeling and peptide fragmentation by electron transfer enables the analysis of N-acetylglucosamine (GlcNAc) glycosylation dynamics and identification of GlcNAcylated protein sites.
Nat. Chem. Biol. 3, 339-348 (2007)
DC-SIGN signaling: Good receptor, bad receptor
The DC-SIGN receptor can promote two distinct cellular responses when activated: increasing NF-κB activity through acetylation by stimulating the Ras/Raf-1 pathway, and Rho GTPase activation through binding to the Rho GEF LARG.
Immunity 26, 605-616 (2007)
The CFG is a large research initiative composed of more than 300 participating investigators and seven scientific core laboratories. Funded by NIGMS in 2001 to elucidate the roles of carbohydrate-protein interactions in cell communication at the cell surface, the scientific core laboratories produce resources and services for investigators performing experiments that address the goals of the CFG. Data produced by the scientific cores are accessible from the Functional Glycomics Gateway. Specialty databases for glycan-binding proteins, glycan structures and glycosyltransferases are also available.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 18, 2007
Categories: Publications | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature 448, 149 (2007).
Obituary: Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (1932–2007): Pioneer of soft-matter physics.
Françoise Brochard-Wyart writes:

"De Gennes fostered a collective research effort that is scarcely imaginable today. Papers were signed not with the names of individuals, but with the name of the group. Theoreticians would spend half their time contemplating liquid crystals under the microscope and discussing practical experiments. Researchers would often arrive in the morning to find a note from de Gennes that would launch them in yet another ground-breaking direction. Calling on his vast knowledge of physics, de Gennes drew analogies between different fields. For example, he realized that laws developed to describe superconductivity phenomena could be used to understand phase transitions in liquid crystals."

Read the rest of this biographical note at Nature.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 18, 2007
Categories: Authors | Permalink | Comments (0)

Udo Hahn and colleagues add to the discussion "making data available to all" by describing the benefits of automated, as opposed to manual, structured abstracts (see Nature 448, 130; 2007). They write:

Mark Gerstein and colleagues in Correspondence (Nature 447, 142; 2007) propose that journals should require authors to manually provide structured abstracts to facilitate text mining of biological information. There are three main difficulties in implementing such a proposal.
First, life-science terminologies are huge, diversified and complex. This means that identifying the correct content descriptors is almost impossible for inexperienced users of online term repositories. For example, Medical Subject Headings , the International Classification of Diseases and Gene Ontology are high-volume — tens of thousands of terms — and structurally complicated terminological systems, each with different design rationales, naming conventions and principles of structural organization. Even human indexers, search specialists and database curators with routine exposure to these resources have to invest much effort in understanding and keeping track of their content as well as terminological updates and revisions. Will scientists find the time to dive so deeply into this alien terminological territory, and be capable of finding exactly what they are looking for?
Second, the coverage of existing terminologies for the many subdomains in the life sciences is incomplete. The two main terminological umbrella systems for the life sciences, the Unified Medical Language System and the Open Biomedical Ontologies, contain impressive numbers of individual terminologies, but their coverage of the life sciences is still fragmentary and suffers from varying depths of description. The size of the terminology gap is likely to be even more pronounced if authors were required to encode relational descriptions, for example indicating a binding relation between two specific proteins, P1 and P2, by Bind(P1, P2), because such a vocabulary has not yet been determined.
Third, the quality and reliability of author-supplied content descriptions is quite a hurdle. Even if the first and second problems were to be solved, human indexers, even professional ones, are liable to error as well as to the possibility of intrinsic subjective bias (M. E. Funk and C. A. Reid Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 71, 176–183; 1983). This is not to say that authors of a structured abstract would consciously cheat, but rather there is a grey area of overstatement and overestimation of one's own results in a highly competitive scientific environment. If authors' structured entries were subject to peer review together with the submitted article, this would be more work for the reviewers as well as the authors — neither of them likely to have been trained as terminologists.
As an alternative, we suggest automated procedures for knowledge capture in which neither the authors nor the reviewers are in the loop. There has been significant progress in automatic text mining and information extraction as well as in the methodological foundations of life-science terminologies in terms of ontologies, knowledge representation languages and semantic encoding standards. These efforts in automating the generation of content descriptions and linking them directly to biological databases are strongly experimentally founded and would help to avoid additional workload and subjectivity — see, for example, the BioCreAtIvE competition results. Once automated mechanisms for content analysis are applied, this also increases the coverage and the recency of the literature entered into biological databases, as human input is complemented by computationally generated content.
Udo Hahn, Joachim Wermter
Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany
Rainer Blasczyk & Peter A. Horn
Hannover Medical School, Germany

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 17, 2007
Categories: Communication, Data availability | Permalink | Comments (2)

Dr Daniel Kalman of Emory University Atlanta, writes to tell us of his delight that the image of a cell infected with poxvirus that graced the July 2005 cover of Nature Medicine -- the work of Illustrator Katie Ris -- has been included as a finalist in the Nikon Small World Microphotography Competition. Voting is now open to the public to choose the winner, so Dr Kalman would like to encourage you to go to the competition site and vote -- ideally for his lab's picture, of course ;-).
Here is a link to the competition website.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 17, 2007
Categories: Author services, Awards | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lovelybooks is a new, free online initiative to get people talking and thinking about books. Developed by Nature Publishing Group's owners Holtzbrinck, in Stuttgart, an English-language version has just been launched as a beta version. We encourage you to sign up and help develop the site.
Lovelybooks lets you create a virtual bookshelf by adding books from Lovelybooks' database or from Amazon (USA or UK site), rate and review books, recommend books and meet other readers with similar tastes. So far, there are no subject tags for "science" (see the site's tag cloud here), so do take the opportunity to rectify this omission by recommending your favourite science-related books.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 16, 2007
Categories: Partners, Publications | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Reports Stem Cells is an interactive forum for stem cell scientists and other stakeholders to communicate about the research, policy, ethics, business and medicine of stem cell science. And it's all free! This month you can read about the editors' trip to Cairns, Australia, to cover the year’s biggest stem cell conference, held by the International Society of Stem Cell Research (ISSCR). You can read about the research trends, plus scientists’ thoughts on where the field is headed. See our conference overview here. Also check out our ISSCR entries on our blog, The Niche.
Top stories of the month include:
Reprogramming expert makes a lab in two countries
Learn how Shinya Yamanaka plans to crisscross an ocean to unravel pluripotency. See what's bringing him to San Francisco's Gladstone and keeping him at Kyoto University.
Scientific society seeks smart growth
Read the commentary by Leonard Zon, past president of ISSCR, in which he describes how stem cell science has gone global, and how moving off North America spurs collaboration. The ISSCR has enlisted the man who brought billions to California stem cell science
Benefits of stem-cell engraftment may not last
Cardiac researchers report artifacts and transient improvements in animal models.
Read also about the powerful potential of pericytes collected from human adult tissues and how old, misoriented stem cells go dormant in Drosophila.
Asian-Pacific stem cell scientists discuss regional network
Learn about and participate in plans to share human and material resources across the region.
Read information normally kept from public view
See peer reviewers' thoughts on a Nature paper describing a surprising origin of blood
And read a theological argument in favour of chimaera research.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 13, 2007
Categories: Communication, Publications | Permalink | Comments (1)

As outlined on her Mind the Gap blog at Nature Network, Jennifer Rohn and her partner in design Wynn Abbott have devised a competition to challenge fashion designers, from students all the way up to celebs, to reinterpret lab coats for the twenty-first century. The brief: the coats must still discharge a protective function, but they must also be fun, fresh, sexy and original in design.
Further details of this LabLit/SciCult competition to reinvent the humble lab uinform are provided here, together with a nice sketch by Vera Bravo to get people's creativity started.
Jennifer writes: "We will make a formal call for designs within the next few months and our panel of judges will make a decision on the shortlist in autumn. If all goes to plan, we will coordinate with London Fashion Week in Spring 2008 and host a gala catwalk event at which the overall winner will announced. In addition to the main prize, we will also give out awards for the best accessories, such as gloves, masks and safety goggles. If anyone’s interested in getting involved or needs more information, let Wynn or me know! So come on, people, pimp my coat! I’m tired of putting on the same old stained, shapeless one every morning."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 13, 2007
Categories: Awards, Partners, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

More than 100 STM publishers, including Nature Publishing Group, and three UN organizations (WHO, FAO and UNEP) have announced the extension of programmes that provide free, or almost free, access to online peer-reviewed journals to several developing nations that lack access to information and training. Microsoft has also announced its support of technical assistance to enhance access to online research for scientists, policymakers, and librarians in these countries.
The three sister programmes – HINARI (research on health), AGORA (research on agriculture) and OARE (research in the environment) - provide online research access to more than one hundred of the world’s poorest countries. All three programmes have official commitment from their partners until 2015, marking the target for reaching the Millennium Development Goals.
In a World Health Organisation (WHO) survey conducted in 2000, researchers and academics in developing countries ranked access to subscription based journals as one of their most pressing problems. In countries with per capita income of less than $1000 per annum, 56 per cent of academic institutions surveyed had no current subscriptions to international journals. These three programmes aim to solve this problem and make research as easily accessible in countries such as Sierra Leone as it is in the United States.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 12, 2007
Categories: Access, Partners | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Nature 448; 117 (12 July 2007):
The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich has completed recruitment for its top positions with the appointment of Heidi Wunderli-Allenspach, a chemistry professor there, as the university's first-ever female rector.
She will work alongside the institute's new president, Ralph Eichler, who was appointed in May. Eichler, a physicist, is currently director of the Paul Scherrer Institute, a sister research institute. Both will take office on 1 September.
The ETH has lately been rocked by internal disputes that culminated in the resignation of its last president, Ernst Hafen, in November 2006, and formal complaints to the government about perceived unfairness in the allocation of federal university funds.
Wunderli-Allenspach says that this is now a time for consolidation and reconciliation — and, perhaps, for hiring more women. "It is not a hostile place here for women, but we have to make a bigger effort, earlier on, in recruitment," she says.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 12, 2007
Categories: Careers | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Pathway Interaction Database, the authoritative collection of signaling pathways that take place in human cells, has just been updated for July. The database is brought to you, free of charge, by the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) and Nature Publishing Group, and is updated each month. To date, there are 51 human pathways and 2,642 molecular interactions curated by NCI--Nature, and 254 human pathways and 3,003 interactions imported from Biocarta. Recently added pathways are a4b1 and a4b7 integrin signalling, and p75(NTR) mediated signalling.
Please visit the Pathway Interaction Database for more July updates and news.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 11, 2007
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Nature Reports Climate Change is dedicated to authoritative in-depth reporting on climate change and its wider implications for policy, society and the economy. With weekly updates, Nature Reports Climate Change ensures you are up-to-date with arguably the most far-reaching challenge of this century.
On the associated blog Climate Feedback, Olive Heffernan reports on last weekend's "biggest global media event of all time…and by far the largest climate awareness event in history. Al Gore’s concerts for a climate in crisis were watched by an estimated 2 billion viewers (at the events, on TV and an unprecedented number online) and took place over 24 hours on seven continents (thanks in part to the somewhat lesser known band Nunatak taking a break from field work!)"
See Olive's Climate Feedback post for her take on the likelihood of this concert succeeding in its "call for change".

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 10, 2007
Categories: Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

You can now visit Planet Nature to read all the nature.com blogs in one place. The latest posts from all the blogs are displayed on the Planet Nature home page, where you can also filter the displayed posts by keyword, sign up to RSS feeds of any of the individual blogs, and search across the blogs. Watch the space for further developments.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 10, 2007
Categories: Publications | Permalink | Comments (2)

Cell Migration Update, a part of the Cell Migration Gateway, is a one-stop online resource designed to keep you in touch with the latest and hottest research in cell migration, brought to you by Nature Publishing Group in collaboration with the Cell Migration Consortium. The July update is now live.
Each month we showcase two exciting new cell migration articles from the current literature. Nature Publishing Group papers are available free for 3 months, and the Editor's Reviews are free indefinitely. The July selections are now live:
Collective migration: Bringing up the rear
Two independent chemokine receptors that respond to the same signal ensure the coordinated movement of primordial cells during zebrafish posterior lateral line system development.
Autologous chemotaxis: Following your own guide
Cancer cells secrete their own chemotactic cues to direct their migration towards lymphatic vessels.
The Consortium news updates for July are here.
The Research Library categorizes and provides access to essential recent cell migration-related research published by Nature Publishing Group and other key journals. The selection is deliberately broad to facilitate access to all research relevant to the cell migration community. Both primary research and review articles are included, as are News and Views articles.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 10, 2007
Categories: Publications | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is Citation Extortion practised? asks Peter Murray-Rust, a professor of chemistry at Cambridge University. He writes of a researcher he met who said she had submitted a manuscript and been told by the publisher (or editor) that it would not be published unless she included at least two citations to papers published by that publisher. Professor Murray-Rust is understandably appalled by this report, and asks readers of his blog whether this is a routine experience for them when submitting papers. Certainly this practice does not occur at any journals published by Nature Publishing Group: the citation list is entirely up to the author, although peer-reviewers (who are independent of the journals and of each other) might make suggestions as part of the revision process.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 09, 2007
Categories: Policies Feedback, Quality measures | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is delighted that Nature is a 2007 winner of the prestigious Principe de Asturias award established by His Royal Highness Heir to the throne of Spain. The Principe de Asturias Award is the best-known cultural prize in the Spanish-speaking community. The awards honour individuals, groups or institutions whose creative work or research represents a significant contribution to universal culture in the scientific, technical, cultural, social and humanistic fields. Nature shares the 2007 Award for Communication and Humanities with the journal Science.
"This is a wonderful honor that took us completely by surprise. It no doubt recognizes the dual role of Nature in communicating outstanding science and key societal issues to diverse audiences. But above all, it's a reflection of the value and impact of scientific research itself within today's culture", said Nature Editor-in-Chief Dr Philip Campbell.
The award coincides with NPG's launch earlier this week of NPG Iberoamerica, a new company dedicated to publishing for NPG in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds, particularly in the medical research domain.
"We are so honoured to receive this award", comments Dr Annette Thomas, Managing Director of NPG. "I am visiting Madrid for the launch of NPG Iberoamerica and the bestowing of this award on Nature could not be more timely. We look forward with great enthusiasm to working with the Spanish-speaking scientific community not only in Spain but also in Latin America, under the leadership of Lucia Ferreiros, our newly appointed head of NPG Iberoamerica".
The award for scienctific and technical research was won by Peter Lawrence and Gines Morata. The winners for the other categories are Amos Oz, Al Gore and Bob Dylan.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 06, 2007
Categories: Awards, Publications | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the Thesis article in the July issue of Nature Nanotechnology (2, 386 - 387; 2007), Chris Toruney addresses important differences between nanotechnology and other areas, in particular fuel-cell and hydrogen technologies, that it wouls be wise to take into account when involving the public in discussions about new developments in nanoscience and nanotechnology. He writes:

"The number of projects that encourage the public to engage with nanotechnology is growing all the time. However, some scientists are uncomfortable with the idea that non-experts should have active roles in decisions about nanotechnology because they think it will allow uninformed outsiders to second-guess them. All this public engagement activity might also seem peculiar at a time when public awareness of nanotechnology is miniscule. Regardless of these reactions, public engagement is becoming a serious component of nanotechnology policy in many countries, and interesting things are happening."

Read on at Nature Nanotechnology (subscription or site licence required).

The current issue of Nature carries an Editorial urging governments to act on researchers' attempts to engage the public over nanotechnology. See Nature 448, 1-2 (2007).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 06, 2007
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