Nautilus

Will you be working on Christmas Day? Richard J. Ladle et al. in Nature's Correspondence page this week (450, 1156; 2007) report evidence that increasing numbers of scientists are swapping party hats for mouse mats during the festive season. Take a look at their suitably decorative evidence, and I urge you to take their advice.
Earlier this year, I was asked by a scientist blogger, Attila Csordas, "what is your science blogging style?". Here is my answer, which was posted at Partial Immortalization during November:
"My professional blogs (Nautilus, Peer to Peer and From the Blogosphere) are addressed to a particular group of people: scientists who read, review and publish, or would like to publish, in our journals. Therefore, the style I try to achieve is helpful, informative and stimulating, yet not didactic or dull. I aim to highlight the benefits of publishing at Nature Publishing Group and provide assistance to those wishing to do so, in a way that is not too directly promotional, but which is constructive to authors and interesting to them and other readers, as well as encouraging their feedback. Therefore I write about news concerning journal policies and format, as well as announcements of new journals, projects, conferences and online tools of interest to authors and reviewers. I also highlight when journal content is free for some reason, because this means that the authors of those articles are achieving greater "reach" for their articles (as well as making it possible for more people to read them, by my announcement). I also highlight news from the wider world of science communication, for example about quality indicators (citations tools and impact factors, for example), ethics, peer-review and so on, in the hope of stimulating community discussion of these issues, as this can help us decide on our journals' evolution. Finally, I blog to provide an approachable forum for potential authors to ask questions about our publication policies, and to have them answered quickly in a way that can also benefit others, as they can see the responses."

A happy Christmas, New Year and holiday to all readers of Nautilus. I will be back in the new year. In the meantime, if you wish to read and discuss stimulating articles with a scientific accent during this holiday season, please visit Nature's News website, and for general scientific-related interactions and chat, you will find much to interest you at Nature Network's many forums and groups.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 21, 2007
Categories: General | Permalink | Comments (1)

Two scientists writing a Commentary article, "Professor's little helper", in the current (20 December) issue of Nature (450, 1157-1159; 2007) want to stimulate your brains – in more ways than one.
Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir from the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge University argue that the increased usage of brain-boosting drugs by ill and healthy individuals raises ethical questions that cannot be ignored. An informal questionnaire Sahakian and Morein-Zamir sent to some of their scientific colleagues in the United States and United Kingdom revealed fairly casual use by academics, and we now want to hear your views on the topic.
The authors' arguments can be read in more detail in their Commentary at Nature (450, 1157-1159; 2007). A Nature editorial in the 15 November issue (Nature 450, 320; 2007) also discussed some of the ethical issues surrounding drug-based enhancement in healthy individuals inspired by a longer discussion paper from the British Medical Association.
To trigger broader discussion of these issues Sahakian and Morein-Zamir propose the following questions:
> Should adults with severe memory and concentration problems be given cognitive enhancing drugs?
> If such drugs have only mild side effects, should they be prescribed more widely for other psychiatric disorders?
> Do the same arguments apply for young children and adolescents with neuropsychiatric disorders, such as those suffering from ADHD?
> Would you boost your own brain power?
> How would you react if you knew your colleagues – or your students – were taking cognitive enhancers?
> How should society react?
Please contribute to this online discussion. We especially want to hear from you if you’re already using these drugs – or if you know people who are. What are your reasons for taking, or not taking, them?
For the next two weeks, the authors of the Nature Commentary will be joining in the conversation at the Nature Network forum: we look forward to meeting you there.
See also the related post, Brain doping, over at Action Potential.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 20, 2007
Categories: Disciplines, Education, Ethics, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a Commentary in the latest (January) issue of Nature Immunology (9, 3-5; 2008), Mentoring and networking: how to make it work, Laura Haynes and coauthors describe the importance and steps required for good mentoring and networking.
Mentoring is considered so important for the development of scientists that the National Science Foundation now requires its grantees to provide information on how they will mentor postdoctoral fellows. The Nature Immunology authors address why this function is crucial, how good mentors can be found, and outline the process and benefits -- "a mentor should equip the mentee with the necessary advice and tools to establish themselves as a researcher, while the mentee must be prepared to translate advice into action."
It is perhaps not so intuitively obvious why networking is important. Clearly, it is a useful skill in finding a new job, but as Haynes et al. point out, it is essential to continuing success in all aspects of a career, as it consists of making meaningful, long-lasting contacts to enhance a researcher's visibility in a field where other people are reviewing one's grants and publications, choosing speakers to invite to conferences and seminars, and providing job and award references. The authors write: "new and innovative ways to network have become available to the more technologically savvy researcher. One example is Nature Network, which is an online meeting place for local scientists to gather, talk and find out about the latest scientific news and events in their area. Among other features, the website allows researchers to create personal profiles and set up groups for labs, departments or institutions, and it allows each member to build a network of like-minded scientists."

Update: Corie Lok, Editor of Nature Network, writes here about why networking is good for your career, describing a talk she gave at the New York Academy of Sciences.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 19, 2007
Categories: Careers | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bali has not been the only island that has just hosted a climate-change conference. The BBC World Service's Digital Planet today runs a short feature and podcast about Nature Publishing Group's Second Nature, an archipelago of islands in Second Life, in which climate scientists – or their representational avatars – have been hosting talks and discussions. Timo Hannay, publishing director at Nature Publishing Group, describes how we went about achieving this series of virtual talks in a podcast which is available for one week only (until Tuesday 25 December) via the Digital Planet site.
Full reports of the Second Nature conference are at Joanna Scott's Nature Network blog. A brief description of the virtual conference's aims is here, with full presentations, Q/As and slides of the first two talks, by Tara LaForce of Imperial College London and Euan Nisbet of Royal Holloway College London.
You can follow our coverage of the real UN climate change conference at Climate Feedback blog -- just keep scrolling, there are many excellent posts from Olive Heffernan, Editor of Nature Reports Climate Change, who was in Bali for the duration.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 18, 2007
Categories: Author services, Communication, Disciplines, Partners | Permalink | Comments (0)

The consistently intelligent and thoughtful FemaleScienceProfessor, whose blog I highly recommend to all scientists as regular reading, here writes about formatting of articles, by no means a trivial topic. From the FSP's blog post:

"This issue of formatting is important because if a reviewer of a proposal (or a reader of a research statement) is reading more than a few proposals/statements (e.g., dozens to > 100), they may well not read every word. You need to write your document so that a reader either wants to read every word (because what you write is so fascinating) or you need to structure the text so that essential points will be noticed. It is very important that these essential points have content and not just be empty statements to the effect that you think you are awesome."

Those wishing to submit their research reports to scientific journals will also benefit from the advice in FSP's post.

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

Nature's latest Insight collection of reviews, Proteins to proteomes (Nature 450, 963-1009; 2007) is freely available online. Proteins are the most diverse and versatile set of biological macromolecules, having crucial roles in all biological processes. Now that whole complements of proteins (proteomes) for many cell types have been identified, we can begin to address the central question of how the innumerable protein functions are integrated so that a living cell interacts coherently with its environment. The Insight collection of five reviews covers vibrant areas of research in the 'protein world', journeying from single-protein dynamics, to functional proteomics and drug discovery, via new technological developments in structural, computational, evolutionary and cellular biology.
The Insight supplement is available here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 17, 2007
Categories: Disciplines, Publications | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Geoscience, whose first print/online edition will be published in January 2008, has published its first papers -- as advance online publications. Among these are a Commentary by Martin Visbek, "From climate assessment to climate services", who writes "If we fully embrace past assessment and ongoing future projections of regional climate change as the task of integrated climate services, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change] can be relieved of the duty of providing up-to-date assessments of climate change. This would allow the panel to move to the decadal assessments that best suit its primary task: reviewing emerging scientific knowledge and best practices to evaluate global climate change."
Also just-published are Letters by Parsons et al., on quiet zones in the San Andreas fault; and by Beerling et al. on cold intervals in the "greenhouse world" of the Mesozoic.
Nature Geoscience is accepting manuscripts that report new research in the Earth and planetary sciences, aimed at a broad interdisciplinary audience of geoscientists. View the complete Guide to Authors here. Submit your papers via the journal online submission system here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 14, 2007
Categories: Disciplines, Publications | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Nature Reports Stem Cells: November was an eventful month for stem cell research. First came the finding that embryonic stem cells could be made from cloned primate embryos; a week later came announcements that human skin cells could be genetically engineered to be virtually indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells. Meanwhile, advances continued apace. The International Society for Stem Cell Research hosted its first conference in China, attracting hundreds of scientists (see this post on The Niche). Researchers in cardiovascular medicine debated how to apply knowledge toward therapies. And scientists from disparate disciplines pursue culture conditions better able to mimic what cells experience in vivo.
Achieving pluripotency in human cells
In October, we asked for feedback on how to tell when human cells deserve the label of pluripotency. Kyoto University's Shinya Yamanaka discusses experimental design where having a positive control is impossible. The University of Sheffield's Peter Andrews suggests that the term, like 'gene', might be more useful if it can mean a variety of subtly different things. Others offer the notion of a 'pluripotency score'.
The collective wisdom is on The Niche.
Last month’s breakthroughs reprogramming adult human cells and cloning primate embryonic stem cells, make the need to define pluripotency all the more pressing. Nature Reports Stem Cells has put together a collection of relevant articles.
For these and more news, journal club, features and summaries of latest research, please visit Nature Reports Stem Cells, a free interactive forum for stem-cell scientists and others interested in the discipline to communicate about the research, policy, ethics, business and medicine of stem-cell science.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 13, 2007
Categories: Disciplines | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature China's "Recommendation of the month" award has been won by Timon Cheng-Yi Liu at the South China Normal University in Guangzhou. He has won a free subscription to Nature for recommending the paper: The phosphothreonine lyase activity of a bacterial type III effector family. Timon writes: "Pathogenic bacteria can inject into host cells virulence factors via the so-called type III machinery. Li et al. describe a family of bacterial virulence factors that have a previously unknown phosphothreonine lyase activity that can remove the phosphate from signaling mitogen-activated protein kinase family members involved in innate immunity. This family of effectors is important in the virulence of a variety of animal and plant bacterial pathogens, including Shigella, Salmonella, and Pseudomonas syringae". You can add your comments about the paper here.
If you would like to recommend a paper reporting high-quality research in any scientific or medical discipline originating from mainland China and Hong Kong for inclusion in Nature China, you can do so here. Nature China aims to highlight the best research being produced in Hong Kong and mainland China. Every week, its editors survey the scientific literature to identify the best recently published papers from the region, and provide short summaries. The choices are sorted into categories to provide a useful study and research resource. Readers can rank and comment on the chosen papers. In the case of research published in Nature journals, access to the original article is provided.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 12, 2007
Categories: Author benefits | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Nature's obituary of Leslie Orgel (1927–2007) :

Although Orgel was a theoretician, he always demanded that theory be subject to rigorous experimental validation. This, he felt, was especially true in the field of the origins of life, where "theories are a dime a dozen and facts are in short supply". He took great pleasure in a positive result, to the point of rooting for the pen on a graph-plotter during chromatography experiments. But he also delighted in negative results, because they pushed him to devise new hypotheses. This, of course, is the way scientists are supposed to behave, but Orgel was one of the few who actually did so.

The full obituary, by Gerald F. Joyce, is at Nature 450, 627; 2007.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 11, 2007
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Biotechnology and Nature Reviews Drug Discovery announce a joint web focus, Antivirals, hosting a collection of Reviews, Research Highlights and Commentaries covering the science and business of antiviral drug research and development, highlighting innovative approaches and lessons learned from decades of antiviral drug development, as well as identifying key issues for future antiviral drug discovery and potential solutions. The web focus also includes an online library of recent research papers and review content from other Nature Publishing Group journals. All articles, and selected content from the library, are freely available from December 2007 until June 2008.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 10, 2007
Categories: Author benefits, Disciplines | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Editorial in the December issue of Nature Nanotechnology , A little knowledge (Nature Nanotechnology 2, 731; 2007) acknowledges that communicating the risks and benefits associated with nanotechnology to the general public is more complex than researchers might have expected. According to surveys, one of which is published in the same issue of the journal, the public is not interested in the possible risks of the technology (despite Michael Crichton's best efforts).
In their report, Scientists worry about some risks more than the public (Nature Nanotechnology 2, 732 - 734; 2007), Dietram A. Scheufele et al. compare two recent US surveys among nanoscientists and the general public, concluding that "in general, nanoscientists are more optimistic than the public about the potential benefits of nanotechnology. However, for some issues related to the environmental and long-term health impacts of nanotechnology, nanoscientists were significantly more concerned than the public."
One interesting conclusion of the research is that industry and academic scientists are among the very few groups the public trusts the most for information about nanotechnology — greater than government bodies, regulatory agencies and news media. The authors write: "Nanotechnology may, therefore, be one of the first emerging technologies where academia and business have the ability to reach out directly to a public who trusts the information they provide. Ironically, nanotechnology may also be the first emerging technology for which scientists may have to explain to that public why they should be more rather than less concerned about some potential risks."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 07, 2007
Categories: Biosecurity, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

From an Editorial in today's (6 December) issue of Nature (450, 762; 2007):
Although Nature and the Nature journals are built on a business model funded by subscribers and other sources of revenue, various initiatives have been implemented to enhance the accessibility of the research papers published in these journals.
They have long been freely available to researchers in the 100 or so poorest countries through the World Health Organization's Hinari initiative and others like it. Machine access is being enhanced by the open text-mining initiative of the Nature Publishing Group (NPG). Preprints of original versions of papers can be deposited in arXiv and Nature Precedings without compromising their acceptability for publication. And final authors' versions of papers can be deposited in PubMed Central and other public servers from six months after publication. Authors retain copyright of their work, whereas NPG retains the licence to publish it.
For many years, a more generous arrangement has been made for papers reporting full genome sequences. (The paper reporting the sequence and analysis of 12 species of Drosophila is the most recent example, see Nature 450, 203; 2007). These papers are freely accessible on NPG's website from the moment of publication. This recognizes a consistent character of 'genome' papers: they represent the completion of a key and fundamental research resource, describing and reflecting on what has been revealed but not usually providing insights into mechanism. Although some papers in other disciplines might also be characterized in this way, the fundamental character of the genome has led NPG to make a systematic exception.
In the continuing drive to make papers as accessible as possible, NPG is now introducing a 'creative commons' licence for the reuse of such genome papers. The licence allows non-commercial publishers, however they might be defined, to reuse the pdf and html versions of the paper. In particular, users are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the contribution, provided this is for non-commercial purposes, subject to the same or similar licence conditions and due attribution.
In 1996, as human genome sequencing was getting under way, leading players stated: "It was agreed that all human genomic sequence information, generated by centres funded for large-scale human sequencing, should be freely available and in the public domain in order to encourage research and development and to maximise its benefit to society". These principles have continued to guide the field, and NPG has consistently made genome papers freely available in keeping with them. This new licence allows us to formalize the arrangement.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 06, 2007
Categories: Access, Data availability | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fundamental research can yield unforeseen benefits of great value for society, but often this happens only many years after the initial breakthroughs have been made. Can society find a way to pay back this debt?
In a Commentary in this month's issue of Nature Physics (3, 824-825; 2007), Leon N. Cooper of Brown University, writes that "Money is required to do science and as systems become more complex, more people, equipment, and therefore more money is required for each new result. Naturally, people hark back with sentimentality to the good old days when results could be obtained on a tabletop. In fact, some results are still obtained on tabletops, but the tables are getting larger and the tops more expensive. More and more results come from huge collaborations demanding enormous resources. And this brings us inevitably to the questions of who pays, how and why."
After outlining some of the problems in supporting the fundamental research necessary for science to progress, Professor Cooper suggests three measures to improve the current system, involving investment, distribution, and a clear distinction between fundamental and applied research. Referring to the breakthroughs in superconductivity research, he writes: "No single method can solve all of our problems, but the measures outlined above would substantially improve our present system. I would hope that they would make it easier for some current gifted program officer to reach as wise a decision as was made in the Army Ordnance Office fifty years ago."
Read the full article, entitled "The unpaid debt", in the December issue of Nature Physics.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 05, 2007
Categories: Careers, Publishing, Support | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature is holding a series of events on Second Life to coincide with the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, from 3 to 14 December. Second Nature is hosting talks by a range of speakers including Dr Simon Buckle, Director of Climate Change Policy at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change ; Dr Tara LaForce, Imperial College on her research on carbon capture and storage; Professor Euan Nisbet of Royal Holloway College London; and George Monbiot, Guardian columnist and author of the book Heat: How to stop the planet burning. All events are free, open to all, and will be held on our flagship Second Nature island: further details are available from Joanna Scott's Second Life blog on Nature Network.
Nature's archipelago of three virtual islands in Second Life, dubbed Second Nature, was established in November 2006. The islands are now covered in exhibits from scientists who have borrowed land on Second Nature to trial virtual collaboration. NPG is now focusing Second Life as a venue for events, and has been hosting a series of weekly talks since September 2007 -- see this round-up of previous Nautilus posts for some examples. Further events are planned for 2008, and will be announced on Joanna's blog on Nature Network.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 04, 2007
Categories: Author services | Permalink | Comments (0)

In his EMBO Reports editorial this month (8, 1087; 2007), Hope, hype and hypocrisy, Frank Gannon provides examples of overinflated claims made in some recent publications and press releases. He points out that, to the unsuspecting reader, these claims give the impression that a cure or treatment for a disease is just around the corner when the reality is almost always that it isn't. Reasons for this escalation of hype are addressed, but:

"Ultimately, the problem is that scientists over-promise by sending messages of being close to their goals even if this is not true. They also send messages that, as soon as the first results come in, the next steps to real applications are quicker than the previous research stage; this is not true either."

Systematic hyperbole and self-promotion are not only dishonest, but threaten the public's trust and support for science, and ultimately will undermine research itself. Or as Dr Gannon puts it: "an atmosphere of trust and transparency is better than a barrage of exaggerated claims and promises."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 04, 2007
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via an industry press release, I learn that a new standard for search-engine indexing has just (29 November) been launched, called the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP). This standard has been devised by publishers in collaboration with search engines to "revolutionise" (the word used in the press release) the creation, dissemination and use of copyright- and licence-protected content on the internet .
According to the release, ACAP is an open, non-proprietary standard through which publishers, societies, institutions and other content providers can communicate permission for access and use to online intermediaries. ACAP provides a framework that will allow any publisher to express access and use policies in a language that search engines' robot "spiders" can be taught to understand, hence making more content available to users through search engines. Members of ACAP can be seen here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 03, 2007
Categories: Access | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Publishing Group is featuring a free cell biology web focus to highlight some of the exciting research of 2007 from across the Nature Publishing Group, to coincide with the current 47th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Cell Biology (ASCB) meeting in Washington DC (1-5 December 2007). If you are attending the meeting, visit us at booth 228-210 to collect your free copies of Nature and other NPG cell biology titles. Nature's correspondent Brendan Maher is blogging live from the conference at In The Field, and you can join the ASCB group at Nature Network for further discussion. We hope you enjoy the conference in person, or, if you aren't, vicariously via our online coverage and forums. Either way, we hope you enjoy reading this collection of excellent papers, News and Views and other articles with a cell biology theme.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 03, 2007
Categories: Conferences | Permalink | Comments (0)