The week on Nature Network: Friday 18 April
This weekly Nautilus column highlights some of the online discussion at Nature Network in the preceding week that is of relevance to scientists as authors.
The Nature Network week column is archived here.
In the longest-yet comment thread on Nature Network, part of the conversation has turned to open science. Jean-Claude Bradley writes: "For my research group, switching to Open Notebook Science has been extremely beneficial for finding some great collaborators (and friends). We’re working on making anti-malarial compounds so I would be quite happy if someone branched off from our ongoing results to do something useful or even point out another interpretation or error." Jason Kelly, on the other hand, is of the view that "in “open science” discussions is that there are going to be people who think it doesn’t make sense in their (‘very competitive’) field to be open about their work. However, there are many, many scientists whose principle problem isn’t being scooped—it’s that no one notices their work. This is especially true among younger scientists still making a name for themselves or folks in smaller fields. I think there is already significant incentive for young scientists to publicize what they are doing as openly and early as possible. This open group will either be scooped out of existence, or will be more successful thanks to all the unintended benefits of making your work accessible early." These are but two small samples of a broad discussion on "open science", its desirability, and tools to achieve it (as well as tools to achieve plain old archiving). There's further discussion at Deep Thoughts and Silliness blog about the financial viability of open access publishing models.
Ai-Lin Chun describes a day in the life of a Nature journal editor in Tokyo: how she handles manuscripts submitted to the journal Nature Nanotechnology and other important matters.
The news feature from last week’s Nature about how collaborations can go bad, ending up in disputes about data ownership, is followed up by Corie Lok. Would you sign a ‘pre-nuptial’ agreement to try to avoid potential conflicts?, she asks. Further discussion on drawing up an "agreement template" for international collaborations is taking place at the News and Opinion forum.
Structural resolution is under the microscope at The Scientist blog, in a post and discussion about metrics to judge crystal structures.
