Nautilus

Nature Publishing Group is now publishing the American Journal of Hypertension (AJH). The journal publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed articles in the fields of hypertension and related cardiovascular disease under the editorship of Michael Alderman, MD, and now has a new look, both in print and online. In celebration of the move to NPG, the online content of the journal is free site is free until 31 January. AJ H provides a forum for scientific inquiry of the highest standard and publishes articles on basic sciences, molecular biology, clinical and experimental hypertension, cardiology, neurophysiology and more. Visit AJH online to read the full aims and scope of the journal, including the guidelines for authors and for peer-reviewers.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 31, 2008
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Although it seems like yesterday to the editors, an entire year has passed since the launch of Nature Photonics in January 2007. To celebrate, the editors have created a web focus with selected highlights from the first 12 issues, which is available free to registered users until the end of May 2008. This content comprises an assortment of reviews, primary research papers, News and Views pieces, interviews and commentaries, showing the broad coverage that Nature Photonics has successfully achieved. In 2007, the journal published research papers reporting exciting results in topics spanning from quantum optics, plasmonics, photonic crystals, metamaterials and silicon photonics through to terahertz science, biophotonics and free-electron lasers, and many other areas besides.
Nature Photonics birthday editorial (Nature Photonics 2, 61; 2008).
Nature Photonics birthday web focus (free to registered users until 31 May 2008).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 31, 2008
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Martijn J. Schuemie and Jan A. Kors (Bioinformatics doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btn006 ) have created a freely available web-based application that, on the basis of a sample text, can suggest "journals and experts who have published similar articles". Their aim is to help scientists to determine which journal is most appropriate for publishing their results, and which other scientists can be called upon to review their work. The application is called Jane (for journal/author name estimator).
I inputted some sample text to Jane, and was told that the Saudi Medical Journal was my top choice. No disrespect to that journal, but I know (because I am a person and not a computer) that this journal would be inappropriate for my test sample in at least two ways.
I would not primarily recommend an automatic selector to authors trying to decide where to submit their articles. When someone is ready to submit a paper, she or he will have given talks about the work and circulated drafts for comments from others in the field. That is a good time to ask for suggestions and advice about journals in which to publish. The scientist is then well-advised to read the author guidance on a few journals' websites, to find out about editorial scope, impact factor and so on.
I think it is possibly counter-productive to use this kind of text-based comparison system on its own for making decisions about journal submission. At Nature, for example, we are looking for novel results, not something similar to what we have just published. Other journals are the same – most of them are looking for distinctive articles, not incremental repeats.
Rather than relying on computer searches to choose where to submit, I highly recommend looking at our free Author and Reviewers’ website for writing and submission advice. From there one can go straight to a great set of articles written by professional journal editors about how, where and why to submit and publish at the free science-information website SciDev.Net.
In addition, scientists can upload a draft manuscript into a community preprint server, where others in the field can comment and suggest. (Nature Precedings is one such, which provides meta-features such as alerting people in the field when new preprints have been uploaded, but many others. ArXiv is another, for the physical sciences.)
I think it will be a sad day when science journals publish “articles selected for us by computer”.
(I first read about Jane at Nature Network in a post by Graham Steel.)

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 31, 2008
Categories: Author services, Publishing, Writing | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of the longest, and longest-lasting, Nature Network discussions in which I have participated is called "High Impact made by famous ones", started in October 2007 by a graduate student known as "Universal research" as part of the "Ask the Nature editor" forum.
The forum, incidentally, is hosted by the editors of Nature Network, and is for scientists who want to learn more about getting their work published in Nature and the Nature journals, and about careers in scientific editing, straight from the editors of these journals. You are welcome to join the group and post your questions.
Returning to the discussion thread about those "famous ones". The Nature and Nature journal editors who regularly handle manuscript submissions provide their answers to a wide range of questions, including whether being well-known or having a stellar track-record is more likely to get your mansucript sent for peer-review or published (answer: no); blinding of the peer-review process (double-blinding gets an airing, but Nature journal editors explain why they feel the system of single-blinding is best for scientists); duplicate publication (or "salami slicing" as it is often known); and independence of editors from those whose work is being considered.
This thread may not be the longest or the oldest that I have ever seen, but it is certainly among the most focused and useful for authors, and I highly recommend you read it for a unique insight into the editors' thought-processes. If you are at the start of your publishing career as a scientist, you are likely to find this forum very helpful. We welcome you there.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 30, 2008
Categories: Author benefits, Author services, Communication, Publishing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Brian Clegg writes on the Science writers' forum at Nature Network: "I’ve recently had an exchange of emails with a respected scientist who has doubts about the validity of some of the science behind the current thinking on climate change. He has been villified as a ‘climate change denier’ " . Regular readers of Climate Feedback, the blog of Nature Reports Climate Change, will certainly have seen examples of imbalanced, passionately expressed, readers' comments directed at climate scientsts.
Brian asks whether this is really the right way for professional scientists to go about things. He points out as one example that Fred Hoyle's espousal of the steady-state theory long after most astrophysicists were convinced by the Big Bang did not result in him being vilified as a ‘Big Bang denier’. Are there some topics within science in which objectivity is always sacrificed for emotion? Nature Reports Climate Change and Nature Reports Stem Cells are providing light, rather than unnecessary heat, on these particular "flashpoint" areas of science -- and Brian welcomes your views in the Nature Network forum. Are there other disciplines that would benefit from the Nature Reports approach?

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 29, 2008
Categories: Communication, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Commentary in the current issue of Nature by Mounir Errami and Harold Garner, A tale of two citations (Nature 451, 397-399;2008), has predictably received a lot of attention. In a nutshell, the authors ask whether scientists are publishing more duplicate papers, and by their newly devised, automated search of seven million biomedical abstracts, provide the answer that yes, they are.
At the Nature Precedings forum on Nature Network, for example, Hilary Spencer wonders whether posting one’s paper on a preprint server, which has been suggested as one possible check/balance in the system, may rather "facilitate the very plagiarism that it can help to later detect. For many authors, this is a legitimate fear in today’s cut-and-paste climate. Is the risk (of facilitating plagiarism) worth the benefit (of facilitating detection)?" A systematic check by journals of their submitted papers against preprint servers for plaigiarism would be needed if Hilary's suggestion has any foundation (see this Nautilus post for details of an earlier scandal along these lines). Such a check, of course, would be another cost to the publisher of the journal before a research paper could be published.
At the Publishing in the New Millennium forum, also at Nature Network, there is an informed and passionate debate among the scientists in the group about whether more duplicate papers are being published in their fields; whether there are legitimate reasons to publish similar versions of the same paper in different journals; and if there is a problem, how it can be stemmed.
Martin Fenner writes about the issue on his blog, Gobbledygook, and from this post links to some other blog discussion arising from the Commentary. There is another post here, on Nascent (NPG's web publishing department blog) by Euan Adie, which refers to the plagiarism-detection software Cross Check.
In the middle of all the heated discussion, it is worth bearing in mind the policy advice that the Nature journals provide for authors and potential authors who would like guidance for how we, the editors, see this issue. So please see our author and reviewers' website for our polices on: plagiarism, fabrication and due credit for unpublished data; duplicate publication; authorship in general; and confidentiality/pre-publicity. We hope that these policies provide clear and helpful guidance. Authors and potential authors wishing more details can find links to relevant, free-access, journal editorials on each of these pages. Feedback and suggestions are welcome, either as comments to this post or via email.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 28, 2008
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Martin Fenner, on his Nature Network blog Gobbledygook, notes that The Deutsche Ärzteblatt , the official journal of the German Medical Association, will from this month be publishing an English version. The reason? So that the journal is more clearly indexed in databases such as PubMed, hence available to more readers, leading to more citations of journal articles, a better Impact Factor, and enhanced reputation of the journal. Martin's opinion is that although German was once an important scientific language, today only 2 per cent of articles indexed in Medline are in the language. "In the end", he writes, " it makes the exchange of ideas between scientists much easier if we can all use the same language. And Nature Network is a good example for this."
In the stimulating discussion arising from the post, Nicolau Werneck comments that "to this day there are a bunch of interesting words and expressions from German that came into the international scientific jargon in the last 2 centuries, such as gedankenexperiment, eigenvector and gestalt…We must fight. But not to forbid people from talking in english, or other imperialistic arrogant language, and certainly not to make them speak only in English. We must fight for the plurality of languages."
Nicholas Wigginton's view is that of someone considering a postdoc in a country where English is not an official language. "Although the science that the groups I am looking into publish everything in English, some operate their labs in the national language whereas others prefer their science to be done exclusively in science. I find this very interesting."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 25, 2008
Categories: Citation analysis, Format, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Nature 451, 235 (2008): Challengers for the US$1-million prize offered by the James Randi Educational Foundation for proving paranormal powers have just over two years left to claim the cash. Randi has announced that the paranormal-activity challenge, in which contestants must demonstrate their powers 'under proper observing conditions', will end on 6 March 2010 — exactly 12 years after he first offered up the prize money.
Randi says that the challenge was intended to tempt high-profile paranormal-activity celebrities to come forward. In 2007, Randi changed the rules of the prize so that applicants were only eligible to enter if they had a media profile and some form of academic endorsement. But as the prize remains unclaimed, and the highest-profile celebrities have not entered, Randi would rather the million dollars were freed to be used elsewhere in his foundation, he says.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 24, 2008
Categories: Awards | Permalink | Comments (0)

From The New York Times (19 Jan 2008): "The National Institutes of Health do almost nothing to monitor the financial conflicts of university professors to whom it provides grants, a government report found, and the huge federal research agency does not want to start now. The agency does not know the number of conflicts or the nature of them, nor does it track how universities and other institutions went about solving those conflicts, according to a report issued Friday by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services."
The article goes on to outline NIH's view that it would be impossible to monitor all their investigators for possible conflicts of interest; but as universities are increasingly being forced to seek funding from new sources, the problem is becoming unmanageable for them, also. According to the New York Times article, NIH investigators filed only 438 conflict-of-interest reports between 2004 and 2006, 89 per cent of which provided no details about the nature of the conflict being reported or how it was managed. Yet NIH awarded more than $23 billion last year to more than 325,000 researchers at over 3,000 universities.
The Nature journals' policy on competing interests can be found at our author and reviewer website. It states: "competing interests are defined as those of a financial nature that, through their potential influence on behaviour or content or from perception of such potential influences, could undermine the objectivity, integrity or perceived value of a publication.
They can include any of the following:
Funding: Research support (including salaries, equipment, supplies, reimbursement for attending symposia, and other expenses) by organizations that may gain or lose financially through this publication.
Employment: Recent (while engaged in the research project), present or anticipated employment by any organization that may gain or lose financially through this publication.
Personal financial interests: Stocks or shares in companies that may gain or lose financially through publication; consultation fees or other forms of remuneration from organizations that may gain or lose financially; patents or patent applications whose value may be affected by publication."
See our author and reviewer website for more information.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 23, 2008
Categories: Competing interests | Permalink | Comments (0)

Peter A. Todd of the National University of Singapore, and Richard J. Ladle of Oxford University, write in Correspondence this week (Nature 451, 244; 2008):
On 22 November, the Higher Education Funding Council for England announced that the assessment and funding of science-based disciplines will in future be "based on citation rates per paper, aggregated for each subject group at each institution".
Changes in performance indicators always strongly influence individual and institutional behaviour and 'citation game-playing' will no doubt become a staple of coffee-room conversation. What is less clear is how the citation practices of authors may influence bibliometric indicators.
Citation practices are known to be imperfect. The documented problems include excessive citation of an author's own work. Papers cited can be inappropriate or ambiguous in their support and, in some cases, the authors may not have read the papers they cite. Authors may form 'citation coalitions' within research networks. They may fail to provide citations to intellectual precursors or to work reporting conflicting conclusions. There are geographical and language biases. The increasing number of many-authored papers makes it impossible to have a clean-cut general metric in which one author is associated with one paper.
Taken together, these factors represent a problematic degree of error for the proposed bibliometric system of assessment. They place added responsibility on journal editors and reviewers as arbiters of appropriate author conduct.
Unfortunately, there are no simple solutions. Currently, identifying poor citation practices is not emphasized in the peer-review process, so perhaps journals could adopt a system of random citation audits, or periodically request evidence of citation appropriateness from authors. In reality, time constraints and the sheer volume of submissions to many journals mean that such measures are unlikely to be implemented soon.
Until referencing practices improve, we would argue that using citation rates to assess performance is fundamentally flawed.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 22, 2008
Categories: Citation analysis, Quality measures | Permalink | Comments (0)

In another partnership initiative, Goettingen University Library, the German National Library of Science and Technology and Nature Publishing Group (NPG) have announced that all universities, government institutions and publicly funded research institutions in Germany will obtain access to the complete Nature online archive, from 1869 to 2007. The national licence is financed by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) as part of its national licensing project.
For more about the Nature archive and links to history resources available online, see this Nautilus post from 8 January 2008.
See here for the NPG press release (PDF) announcing the partnership.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 21, 2008
Categories: Partners | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has announced a partnership with an online, knowledge-sharing community called Sermo, a website that is freely available to all licensed physicians in the United States, to facilitate the discussion and interpretation of content in NPG's medical journals. NPG will add ‘Discuss on Sermo’ links to the online versions of articles in 12 of its medical journals, including Nature Medicine, Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine , Nature Reviews Cancer and Leukemia. These links will allow physicians reading the journals to create or join discussions of the articles with Sermo's 50,000 members. NPG will make the full text of these selected articles freely available to registered users of Sermo. Physicians use the site to aggregate their observations from their daily practice, then challenge or corroborate each others' opinions. The goal is to accelerate the emergence of trends and insights on medicines, devices and treatments, together resulting in better outcomes for patients.
See here for NPG's press release (PDF) announcing this partnership. More information about Sermo is available here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 21, 2008
Categories: Partners | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine is pleased to announce the launch of a new Clinical Research section. It plans to publish its first original research articles in mid-2008.
Valentin Fuster, Editor-in-Chief of the journal, writes: “Our goal is to serve the community of clinical cardiologists, and demand for this expansion has come from its members. By adding outstanding original clinical research to the latest review content, we can provide everything a busy cardiologist needs to keep up to date with advances in the field. Feedback from our contributors and readers has told us that they want a journal that not only provides timely and succinct analysis of recent advances to ease reading workload, but that they also want original research of the highest quality. We agree and aim to satisfy that demand.”
The field of cardiology is very fast-moving and there is an immense amount of research published each week. Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine will present only well-chosen, robust research and it will review the rest. Filtering is key – we filter all the research published each week by scanning the literature and reviewing salient issues, and will filter our original research submissions to provide only strong, clinically relevant papers. Instructions for authors are available here; the online submission page for the journal is here; find out more about the journal here; or you can contact the research editor by email for further information about submissions of original clinical research papers on the development of new technologies or methodologies that improve understanding of cardiovascular disease or impact on diagnosis or management; new information on clinical outcomes and economics from clinical trials; and new approaches to promote cardiovascular health. A free sample issue is available here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 18, 2008
Categories: Disciplines, Publications | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ron A. Bouchard of the University of Alberta, and Trudo Lemmens of the University of Toronto, write in a Commentary in this month's Nature Biotechnology (Nat. Biotechnol. 26, 31-36; 2008) that the allocation of risks and benefits of publicly sponsored biomedical research is becoming increasingly skewed toward for-profit entities and against the public interest. A legitimate solution to this imbalance would be to levy compulsory government royalty fees on commercial products made possible by public efforts.
The authors argue that "public–private partnerships can be particularly valuable in circumstances involving large transaction costs associated with novel biomedical inventions aimed at the global public good. That said, a combination of self-interest and anxiety in the face of globalization has led to wide swings of the pendulum of S&T policy and scholarship in recent years, with argument for expansive IPR rights on the one hand and their abolition in favor of a completely open source model on the other. Neither position is likely to be balanced or workable over the long term, as both may skew too far to private or public interests." A compulsory government royalty on technologies commercialized using public money, they argue in their Commentary, is a necessary 'third way' to protect the interests of for-profit entities and those of the public.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 18, 2008
Categories: Data availability, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bone Marrow Transplantation has published a special issue on myeloma, edited by Ray Powles, Kenneth Anderson, Jean Luc Harrousseau and Bhawna Sirohi, and freely available online. This special issue follows the recent approval of three new targeted therapies for myeloma. It gives guidance on how the sequence of treatments and supportive therapy can be combined to optimize the patient's treatment pathway, to produce prolonged normal symptom-free survival.
About the journal: Bone Marrow Transplantation publishes high quality, peer reviewed original research that addresses all aspects of basic biology and clinical use of haemopoietic stem cell transplantation. The broad scope of the journal thus encompasses topics such as stem cell biology (for example, kinetics and cytokine control), transplantation immunology (for example, HLA and matching techniques, translational research, and clinical results of specific transplant protocols). Bone Marrow Transplantation publishes 24 issues a year and has an impact factor of 2.621. The guide to authors, including a link to the online submission web page, can be found here. Information for peer-reviewers and about peer-review can be found here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 17, 2008
Categories: Publications | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jennifer Rohn, of University College London and Editor of LabLit, reviews three books in last week's Nature: From bench to book (Nature 451, 128; 2008), addressing how web publishing and marketing might put more science into fiction and attract new readers. The books reviewed are: A Version of the Truth by Jennifer Kaufman & Karen Mack; The Gift: Discovery, Treachery & Revenge by Jon Kalb; and The Expeditions by Karl Iagnemma. Jennifer writes: "In a darwinian scrum for the attention of an increasingly distracted audience, authors who want to write fiction about science, but not straight science fiction, have their work cut out. The gates of publication are typically guarded by humanities graduates who may have no scientific affinity. To slip through the net, stories about scientists are often sugar-coated." Only one of the three books reviewed, The Gift, is a serious work of "lab lit" -- and given its "uncompromising approach to technical detail, it is probably no coincidence that the book is self-published", writes Jennifer.
Jennifer herself is subjected to some Q and A on the Authors page in the same issue of the journal (Nature 451, ix; 2008) about her efforts to improve scientists' fictional standing by her LabLit site "to generate interest in fictionalized science by shedding light on scientists in their natural habitat."
"Q. Do you think publishers are prejudiced against publishing fiction about science?
A. Yes. Most publishers balk at the idea of publishing a fictional book about science. For example, the book I reviewed with the most scientific detail — The Gift by Jon Kalb, which delves into the ruthless world of hominid fossil hunting — was not traditionally published. It is available print-on-demand by the author. I think for this genre there is considerable opportunity for print-on-demand."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 17, 2008
Categories: Communication, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

Michela Noseda of Imperial College, London and Gary R. McLean of the University of Texas Health Science Center write in this month's Nature Biotechnology (26, 28 - 29; 2008) a response to the Brief Communication published by Mazor et al in the May issue (Nat. Biotechnol. 25, 563–565; 2007). What bothers Noseda and McLean is not the article itself, but that it contains, they write, "a lack of documented methodology and information that is essential to faithfully reproduce the science claimed in the manuscript. Surely, the aim of scientific publication is to disseminate scientific information to further advance our knowledge and to allow others to use such information for expansion and possible improvements to the work. Mazor et al. are clearly not the only authors being forced into abbreviated paper formats that follow this trend, which suggests the problem goes significantly deeper.
Admirably, Nature has recently implemented new guidelines for the addition of methods to their published research articles and letters. Authors are given multiple options for the appropriate presentation of methods within their manuscripts, avoiding the demotion of Methods to the supplementary section. This approach should be commended and we hope adopted universally by additional scientific periodicals. Aside from these rules, we should all make an extra effort as authors and reviewers to ensure that scientific methodology resumes its rightful position as the foundation of basic scientific research."

The Nature Biotechnology editors respond (Nat. Biotechnol. 26, 29; 2008):
"Noseda and McLean raise interesting points. With regard to the ability to reproduce a paper's methodology and findings, the fact that descriptions of methods in Supplementary Material online are not copy edited for grammar or clarity at Nature Biotechnology (or at any other Nature monthly journal) could be argued to potentially compromise the lucidness and ease with which a reader can repeat a published experiment. As the authors also point out, Nature's new guidelines for the addition of methods to its published papers provide authors with flexibility in how to present their methods within the final printed issue and online. One additional benefit to Nature's approach, not mentioned by Noseda and McLean, is that references to methods or protocols that appear in the Methods section remain in the printed paper rather than being relegated to online only (where they are less likely to be cited). We would welcome feedback from our readers as to whether they feel Nature Biotechnology should follow a similar model to Nature."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 16, 2008
Categories: Data availability | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Drosophila [fruit fly] courtship is a complex behavior. A new study shows that glia modulate neurotransmission to influence male preference, but the authors should have resisted the temptation to describe their results in tabloid language." Joel Levine of the University of Toronto, begins his Commentary "Glia and romance" (Nature Neuroscience 11, 8 - 10; 2008) with this provocative statement. He goes on to write: "The study by Grosjean et al. [Nature Neuroscience 11, 54–61; 2008] makes an important contribution by calling attention to a neuro-glial element in the circuitry that governs courtship behavior. Furthermore, this study initiates the search for the glutamatergic neurons involved in the processing of courtship pheromones. Apart from its merits, however, this paper has a serious language problem. Throughout, the authors use the term homosexual to describe the behavior of a male mutant that courts both males and females with equal probability." Levine goes on to explain why the use of the term homosexuality to define the flies' behaviour is inappropriate and objectionable.
In a Nature Network journal club discussion of this paper, Nature Neuroscience editor Noah Gray describes the authors' controversial nomenclature, and provides links to some discussion on blogs at the New York Times. Putting this issue aside, questions for the journal club include:
--How could changing the glutamate content in the extracellular space contribute to the altered processing by the appropriate (but unknown) circuits?
--How do these Drosophila courtship behaviours relate to mammalian courtship rituals and what does the current research say about those behaviours?
Via Action Potential, Noah writes the neuroscience online journal club will feature interesting papers from any journal for discussion, in posts written by students and postdocs discussing somebody else's work, in the classic spirit of a journal club.
"This forum is designed to teach the non-specialist about certain neuroscience sub-fields in which they may have some interest, as well as to feature important findings that very well may pertain to the current work of the specialist. Hopefully, the discussion will include the following (and more): questions being asked regarding the data or conclusions of the study; inquiries made as to how to successfully implement particular methodologies; reasons given for why additional data would help the authors solidify their conclusions; suggestions floated as to what the next steps should be in the follow-up experiments."
Another journal club discussion is entitled Extrasensory perception (ESP) fails the test : the Nature Network neuroscience group is clearly setting out to be a lively forum. If you are a neuroscientist, or work in a related discipline, please feel free to join the group and contribute to the discussion.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 15, 2008
Categories: Communication, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seymour Benzer, one of the giants of twentieth-century biology, died on 30 November 2007. Benzer, who maintained an active laboratory until the time of his death, was a unique figure who made seminal contributions to physics, molecular biology and behavioural genetics. See: Obituary: Seymour Benzer (1921-2007) by David Anderson with Sydney Brenner (Nature 451, 139; 2008).
"Benzer's style was to pioneer a new area, and then to move on to something new once the hordes had rushed in. As he said: "I like to take things that are fuzzy, and turn them into something tangible." ........by a simple argument, he deduced that the minimum unit of mutation is probably a single base pair of DNA. This idea was fundamental to connecting the structure of DNA to the reality of genetics. And, together with Fred Sanger's discovery that proteins are composed of precise sequences of amino acids, this work laid the foundations of the new science of molecular biology.
Most scientists would have been content to continue in this exciting field, but Benzer became characteristically restless. For him, once it became obvious how a problem could be solved, it was time to move on to another."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 15, 2008
Categories: General | Permalink | Comments (0)

In an editorial in EMBO Reports this month, The pipeline (EMBO R. 9, 1; 2008), Frank Gannon writes that the number of scientists, technicians and engineers that the European Union needs to keep up its current rate of growth is often estimated to be 700,000 by the year 2010. He writes: "the European economies face a huge deficit of the trained people needed to sustain modern knowledge-based economies". He goes on to discuss some of the reasons for this deficit, concluding that "We need to support and encourage young students and help teachers to communicate science in an exciting and inspiring manner, even as early as primary school. In fact, the scientific community has a lot to do and it needs to start soon if we are to avoid the deficit of skilled scientists and engineers predicted for the coming decade."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 15, 2008
Categories: Careers | Permalink | Comments (0)

For scientists who want to combine public outreach with research, a museum may be the perfect place to work, writes Ricki Lewis in Nature this week in a special report on science career issues and alternative jobs for scientists (Nature 451, 218-219; 2008). "Scientists who work in museums enjoy a dynamic mix of laboratory and field research, collection managing, outreach and education, and exhibition design. The primary advantage is research flexibility, says Kathlyn Stewart, a research scientist in palaeobiology at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. "My work focus is a research programme of my design using museum collections," she says, contrasting this with universities, where teaching and advising students is the focus, or industry or government, where scientists may have little say in their research focus."
"Whether helping to start a new museum or just designing an innovative exhibition, museum work is most valued by those scientists hoping to make an impact with the public. "When I work on an exhibition, I realize that maybe a million visitors a year will see it," says John Flynn of the American Museum of Natural History. "That's an incredible opportunity." "

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 14, 2008
Categories: Careers | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Arthur Kornberg was one of the greatest biochemists of the twentieth century. His career spanned more than 60 years, and such has been the impact of his work on modern biomedical science that his influence will endure for decades." So opens Nature's obituary of Arthur Kornberg, by Tania Baker, at Nature 450, 809; 2007.
Boyana Konforti, Chief Editor of Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, has asked close colleagues to contribute their thoughts and recollections about Kornberg, who died last October. These reminiscences have now been compiled and published together, along with photos, as a permanent record and tribute in the pages of Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. Boyana writes: "In writing these remembrances of Arthur, we have all tried to capture a bit of what he was like, and what working with him meant to us, in the hope that those who knew him will have even richer memories to share and—more importantly—those who didn't know him will get a glimpse of him through our memories. To my mind it is these personal stories (and many more like them) that will be his longest-lasting legacy". The tributes can be seen here: A Tribute to Arthur Kornberg 1918-2007 (Nature Structural & Molecular Biology 15, 2 - 17; 2008). Contributors are Robert S. Fuller, Robert A. Bambara, Tania Baker, Barbara Funnell, Elmar Wahle, Michael O'Donnell, Dale Kaiser, Kirsten Skarstad, Boyana Konforti, Satoko Maki, Tsutomu Katayama, Kazuhisa Sekimizu, Joel H. Weiner, Ronald W. Davis, Lee Rowen, Myron F. Goodman, James Spudich, Suzanne Pfeffer, Charles C. Richardson, Piotr Polaczek, RIch Calendar, Richard Kolodner, Jack Griffith, Bruce Stillman, Paul Modrich, Charles Brenner and Charley Yanofsky.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 14, 2008
Categories: Author services, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

This month's Nature Medicine features a question and answer interview with Marc Hodosh, senior director of the Archon X prize, who explains why genomics was chosen for an X prize and predicts what lies ahead for the field (Nat. Med. 14, 8 ; 2008). These days, if you want to have your entire genome sequenced, you need to spend about a million dollars and wait for months. The Archon X prize for genomics—an international competition for speedy gene mapping—might change this by giving companies a huge incentive to develop better DNA sequencing technologies. The $10 million prize, first announced in late 2006, was donated by Stewart Blusson, a philanthropist and mining multimillionaire. Announcement of a winner, thinks Hodosh, is probably two to four years away. Read the full article, by Genevive Bjorn, at the Nature Medicine website.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 14, 2008
Categories: Disciplines | Permalink | Comments (0)

Alex Witze (currently at AAS) passes on some questions for "sci/pop culture buffs":
In what popular movie does Daryl Hannah play an astronomer? (Answer.)
- What Japanese car company is named after a well-known star cluster? (Answer.)
- What science fiction story, written by an astronomer under a pseudonym, features a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of stellar evolution? (Answer.)
- Can you recite the most famous neutrino poem, and name the poet? (Answer.)
And here's really geeky one I haven't a clue about - if you know, comment below please!
- What rock group had its members' names included in a reference in the Astrophysical Journal, unbeknownst to the editor? (Answer is provided here, with additional story by Oliver Morton).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 11, 2008
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The Neuroscience Gateway has moved to a new URL, www.neuroscience-gateway.org. Building on the success of the gateway, developed in collaboration with the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Nature Publishing Group is now expanding the gateway in new directions. Please update your bookmarks to the Allen Brain Atlas.
The site will continue to provide updates about the latest research, news and events, and will soon be including new features reflecting recent trends in neuroscience research. We hope you'll continue to find the Gateway a useful tool to track progress in neuroscience, and we'll provide more news about the site's development in the coming months.
We welcome suggestions and feedback from the neuroscience community, both at the Neuroscience Gateway and at Action Potential, NPG's neuroscience blog. We also encourage neuroscientists and others interested in the field to join the free neuroscience group on Nature Network, in which editors Noah Gray and Kathryn Devaney run an interactive journal club and host other discussions on what’s new in neuroscience research and publishing.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 11, 2008
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Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the Society for Mucosal Immunology (SMI) have launched a new journal - Mucosal Immunology (see previous Nautilus posts in February 2007 and June 2007). Dr Brian Kelsall of the National Institutes of Health is editor-in-chief of the journal, the first issue of which is now available online. To mark the launch, all content in the inaugural issue is available free of charge.
Mucosal Immunology is now accepting submissions of papers discussing all aspects of immunity and inflammation involving mucosal tissues. Consult the guide to authors and submit your paper.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 11, 2008
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Nature Biotechnology's Data Page this month (Nat. Biotech. 26, 14; 2008) features a topic of perennial interest, that of salaries. Stacy Lawrence reports that life-science researchers in the United States earn more than their counterparts in Japan, Australia and, by quite a considerable amount, Europe. The United States also employs more life scientists in companies than anywhere else. Large biotechnology companies generate as much profit as smaller pharmaceutical firms—with only about half the staff. At the higher end of the scale, chief executives of US biotechnology companies earned an average of $350,000 last year and held an average 5.5% stake in their companies.
Tables of these data are available at Nature Biotechnology.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 10, 2008
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"Any issue of Nature today has nearly the same number of Articles and Letters as one from 1950, but about four times as many authors. The lone author has all but disappeared. In most fields outside mathematics, fewer and fewer people know enough to work and write alone. If they could, and could spare the time and effort to do so, their funding agencies and home institutions would not permit it." So writes Mott Greene of the University of Puget Sound in his recent (single-author, naturally) Nature essay "The demise of the lone author" (Nature 450, 1165; 2007).
Professor Greene goes on to discuss how this practice is affecting, and will affect, the system of awarding credit for work done, predicting that "in those fields where multiple authorship endangers the author credit system, we shall soon see institutionally initiated restriction on the number of authors. Paradoxically, this is likely to be endorsed by all parties as preferable to cinema-style specification of who actually did what. Most will prefer full credit for a few papers to little or no credit for many, considering where it matters most: university committees in charge of tenure, promotion and salary increments based on scholarly production. Given Nature's role in determining, as well as chronicling, how science is reported (see Nature 450, 1; 2007), interested parties could watch these pages to see whether a trend towards more restricted authorship is emerging."

Nature's policy on author contribution statements is here, and was introduced in an Editorial here.
Professor Greene's article is also available on the beautiful website that celebrates the history of the journal Nature.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 10, 2008
Categories: Authorship, Careers, Quality measures | Permalink | Comments (1)

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and BioCentury Publications, Inc announce a new electronic publication, SciBX, that will distill and analyse newly published life-science research to help the translation of academic science into commercial products. The preview edition of SciBX (for Science-Business eXchange) is available from the organisation's website: the publication will be distributed to subscribers every Thursday, starting on 31 January 2008.
SciBX will evaluate hundreds of high-impact, peer-reviewed scientific articles every week and select the most commercially relevant findings that merit deeper analysis. This multidisciplinary approach will provide scientific context, identify potential commercial impact and describe the next steps required to translate the newest laboratory developments into innovative healthcare solutions.
According to Medline, more than 600,000 articles were added to its database in 2006 alone. SciBX will filter this flood of scientific data, and analyse key findings within the most current scientific and business context. It will be an indispensable resource for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, business development specialists, drug discovery and development teams, venture capitalists and other investment professionals who wish to identify new projects and potential new partners, to find enabling technology, and to be aware of competitive advances.
Please download the free preview edition of SciBX , which contains sample articles, including:
- Analysis – Providing in-depth review of new research findings and an essential understanding of the next steps required to transform these developments into commercial value.
- The Distillery – Filtering and classifying the important current research papers in biotechnology, life science and chemistry, the Distillery goes beyond the abstract to explain the science, its commercial relevance, licensing status and identify companies known to be working in the area.
Further information about the publication, the team producing it and the companies supporting it can be found at the SciBX website.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 09, 2008
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From this month (January 2008), Nature Publishing Group is publishing the journal Obesity on behalf of The Obesity Society. The journal is re-launching with a new look and new editorial team, led by Editor in Chief Dr Richard N. Bergman, Chairman of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California and holder of the Keck Endowed Chair in Medicine.
Obesity aims to increase knowledge, foster research and promote better treatment for people with obesity and their families. The journal publishes important, peer-reviewed, original scientific articles, as well as relevant review articles, commentaries, and public health and medical developments. The journal is ranked in two ISI categories, Endocrinology & Metabolism and Nutrition & Dietetics, and has an impact factor of 3.491.
See the journal website for guide to authors and information about submitting papers.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 09, 2008
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Join Nature editor and writer Alexandra Witze at the 211th American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas from 8-11 January. She'll be sending diary reports to our In The Field blog as astronomers gear up for the International Year of Astronomy in 2009.
The AAS meeting schedule is here, with links to the abstracts of all the presentations.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 08, 2008
Categories: Communication, Conferences, Disciplines | Permalink | Comments (0)

The historic moments in modern science reported in Nature can now be explored online. The archive of the first 80 years (1869-1949) of the journal Nature, the world's foremost weekly scientific journal, is now live. Every article published in Nature, back to volume 1, issue 1 is now available online.
Nature’ s archive reveals a wealth of treasures from the first years of the journal, including the first observation of X-rays (Wilhelm Röntgen, 1896), the discovery of the electron (J.J. Thomson, 1897), the first fossil evidence that humans originated in Africa (Raymond Dart, 1925), and the discovery of the neutron (James Chadwick, 1932).
Containing more than 4,000 issues and an estimated 180,000 articles, the 1869-1949 archive completes the digitization of Nature. The project has taken 5 years to complete, beginning with the launch of the 1987-1996 archive in 2003. There is a special web feature, The history of the journal Nature, featuring timelines, video interviews and profiles of all Nature 's (surprisingly few) Editors since the journal was founded.
In places, Nature’s early archive reads like science fiction, with its foretelling of science and technology we take for granted today. The forensic use of fingerprints in solving crime was suggested as early as 1880: "When bloody finger-marks or impressions on clay, glass &c., exist, they may lead to the scientific identification of criminals." Scotland Yard introduced fingerprint identification in 1901, based on an 1892 book by Francis Galton. Motion-capture photograph pioneer Edward Muybridge suggested the development of the ‘photo finish’ in Nature in 1880. Lamenting the 'dead heat' in horse racing, he asked why officials would not "avail themselves of the same resources of science" and employ up to 20 cameras to decide the rightful outcome of races. It would be more than 50 years before the ‘photo finish’ became widely used in sport.
Articles in the Nature archive 1869-1949 are available as PDFs of the original journal article, with HTML abstracts. Access is by site license for institutions, or articles can be purchased individually.
A selection of Nature’s "greatest hits", including the article by Dart, and Watson and Crick’s 1953 paper that deciphers the structure of DNA, are featured in A century of Nature, some of which is free for a limited time.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 08, 2008
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Alice Flaherty of Harvard Medical school wrote in Nature 's Correspondence page (Nature 450, 1156; 20 December 2007):
A common belief about the ways science and art differ is that science convinces with evidence, whereas art persuades through rhetoric. Therefore, we tell ourselves, style does not matter in scientific writing. And yet, of course, it does. Even scientists wish scientists would write more readably.
One place to start is to avoid long words where short ones will do. However, science journals paradoxically foster the use of long words through their 150-word limits on abstracts. Authors who exceed the limit may spend hours looking for bulky portmanteau words to replace several simple ones.
This unfortunate practice has a simple solution. If journals change their word-count limit to a character-count limit that does not include spaces (a function available on most word-processors), scientists will suddenly have an incentive to use short words.
Can such a rhetorical constraint shorten word length? The next call for abstracts could test its effect.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 08, 2008
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The latest journal in the Nature family, Nature Geoscience, introduces a section called Backstory, to celebrate the passion and endurance that geoscientists bring to their work. Each month, there is a question-and-answer piece at the back of the journal or on the journal's website. Because earth scientists like to know exactly where a story is set, each backstory shows the globe from a different perspective, centred on the location of the field work.
Here are some examples from the current (January 2008) issue:
Drillship on ice (Nature Geoscience 1, 76; 2008).
Kate Moran and Jan Backman took an ice-hardened drillship, two icebreakers and two helicopters to the high Arctic to recover many million-year-old sediments from the Lomonosov Ridge. The goal of the Arctic Coring Expedition was to reconstruct the past 60 million years of environmental change in the Arctic by recovering the first-ever long sediment core of deep-sea marine sediments from the Arctic Ocean. The site on the Lomonosov Ridge was chosen by the authors because it has a thick sequence of sedimentary layers covering its crest, which they thought should hold a record of the Arctic's past climate.
Midnight glacier hikes (Nature Geoscience 1, E1; 2008.)
Tim Bartholomaus and Suzanne and Bob Anderson hauled 25 kilograms of equipment over 25 kilometres in 25 hours to get a handle on glacier flow without breaking the bank. Glaciologists and geomorphologists are always looking for the best natural experiments to study the processes acting to shape a landscape. Glacier sliding is key to erosion at the glacier bed. In Kennicott Glacier, Alaska, the authors found an ideal natural experiment to probe the role of glacier hydrology in setting basal motion.
Plates under the sea (Nature Geoscience 1, E2; 2008.)
Using sophisticated multibeam imaging equipment aboard a French Navy vessel, Marc Fournier and colleagues mapped the structure of the enigmatic Owen fracture zone underneath the Arabian Sea. The region where the Arabian, Indian and Somalian tectonic plates meet — a triple junction — is probably the only such feature in the oceanic domain that had not been surveyed with modern oceanographic instruments. Before these authors' expedition, there was very little information regarding its precise location and geometry, although this triple junction can potentially shed light on the history of the break-up of the African plate and the formation of the Arabian plate.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 07, 2008
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Two collections of Essays appeared in Nature last year epitomizing the 'big issues' facing science and society -- Connections and Science and Politics . You can now download free digital editions (PDFs) of both these essay series in a simple, one-click operation at the links in the previous sentence.
The Connections series addresses how researchers, from cell biologists to quantum physicists, are struggling to work out how systems involving large numbers of interacting entities work as a whole. In this collection of essays, scientists explain how a systems approach, in parallel with the reductionism that dominated twentieth-century science, promises to yield fresh insight, and in some cases, to challenge the most widely held concepts of their field.
In the nine Science and Politics essays, experienced advisers on science policy to the US, UK and Swedish governments, as well as other senior scientific advisors, reflect on the highs and lows of being at the intersection of science and society. Do scientists devalue their advice to government by emphasizing uncertainty, the series asks, or is there a need for greater humility when science meets public disquiet?
These essays make stimulating reading -- I enjoyed each one in the weekly issue of Nature. If you missed them, I encourage you to download these PDF editions for reading at your leisure.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 04, 2008
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Owing to my end-of-year holiday, I am a little late bringing you news of the Nature Methods' Method of the Year 2007, which is next-generation sequencing. The journal is publishing in its January 2008 issue a series of free articles showcasing how these novel sequencing methods came into their own in 2007 and the incredible impact they promise to have in a variety of research applications.
From the Nature Methods editorial announcing the winner:
"If the choice of next-generation sequencing as Method of the Year was uncontroversial among our team, we did have other ideas and enthusiastic discussions. To share that excitement, we included a shortlist of Methods to Watch. It is an incomplete and subjective selection, established by Nature Methods with the input of other editors at Nature, Nature Reviews and Nature research journals. Some of these Methods to Watch are, thanks to recent developments, on the cusp of turning around fields of research. Others, by contrast, do not yet have a technical solution but rather represent areas in which methodological developments are sorely needed.
We welcome your comments on our choices as well as your suggestions of other methods to keep an eye on. (To share your thoughts please visit methagora.) We firmly intend this event to become an end-of-the-year tradition, and we hope for your participation in next year's nominations!"
You can add your comments and, as the year progresses, 2008 nominiations at this methagora post.
The announcement and features about the Method of 2007 are at this Nature Methods web focus, including the Methods to Watch articles.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 04, 2008
Categories: Awards, Disciplines | Permalink | Comments (0)

From this week's issue of Nature, a news story by Declan Butler "Free journal-ranking tool enters citation market" (Nature , 451, 6; 2008)
"A new Internet database lets users generate on-the-fly citation statistics of published research papers for free. The tool also calculates papers' impact factors using a new algorithm similar to PageRank, the algorithm Google uses to rank web pages. The open-access database is collaborating with Elsevier, the giant Amsterdam-based science publisher, and its underlying data come from Scopus, a subscription abstracts database created by Elsevier in 2004.
The SCImago Journal & Country Rank database was launched in December by SCImago, a data-mining and visualization group at the universities of Granada, Extremadura, Carlos III and Alcalá de Henares, all in Spain. It ranks journals and countries using such citation metrics as the popular, if controversial, Hirsch Index. It also includes a new metric: the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)."
The article goes on to discuss the new metric, and to compare it with others, notably the dominant Impact Factor of Thomson Scientific. Thomson has set up a web forum to respond formally to an editorial in the Journal of Cell Biology, in which Mike Rossner and colleagues point to discrepancies between their "independent audit" calculations of Impact Factors based on Thomson data, and Thomson's own calculated Impact Factors from the same data.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 03, 2008
Categories: Citation analysis, Quality measures | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature conferences are aimed at the international scientific community, with the goal of fostering and facilitating communication and collaboration between scientists. They are distinguished by: high-quality, international facult; close involvement of Nature Publishing Group’s editorial staff; and a focus on the most timely topics
Details of some upcoming conferences (please see NPG's conference website for further details of these and other future conferences):

A Symposium on Biological Complexity: Genes, Circuits and Behavior
Organized by the Salk Institute, Fondation IPSEN and Nature Neuroscience
10-13 January 2008 • La Jolla, CA
Highlighting recent advances in interdisciplinary neuroscience. The meeting covers multiple fields, from sensory and motor function to emotions to learning.

Miami 2008 Winter Symposium: Regulatory RNA in Biology and Human Health
Organized by the University of Miami, Nature Publishing Group and Scripps Florida
2-6 February 2008 • Miami Beach, FL
Looking at our current understanding of the mechanisms of action and biogenesis of small regulatory RNAs and how this is being applied to create a new generation of therapeutics and diagnostics.

A Ringberg Colloquium: Determinism and Plasticity of T Lymphocytes
Organized by the Max Planck Society and Nature Immunology
10-13 February 2008 • Tegernsee‚ Germany
The aim is to stimulate conceptual breakthroughs leading to advancement in the fields of chronic inflammation and control of infection mediated by T lymphocytes.

Nature Chemical Biology Symposium: Chemical Neurobiology
Organized by Nature Publishing Group and The New York Academy of Sciences
22-23 February 2008 • New York‚ NY‚ USA
The two-day meeting will comprise a series of four scientific sessions that look at distinct molecular functions of a neuron and concludes with a keynote session featuring Linda Buck‚ a pioneer in the field of neuroscience.

Emergence & Convergence mini-symposium: Epigenetics and Behavior
Organized by Fondation IPSEN, Nature Neuroscience and Nature Genetics
31 March 2008 • Houston‚ TX
Speakers will address the role of epigenetics in memory‚ drug addiction‚ maternal care and stress reactivity‚ the effects of endocrine disruption and human disorders such as Rett and Angelman syndromes.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 03, 2008
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