The week on Nature Network: Friday 6 June
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.
A necessarily brief round-up this week, due to lack of time.
Ai Lin Chun, at Nature Nanotechnology: Asia-Pacific and beyond, explains how the journal's Research Highlights come into being . "Every week, each editor reads a list of journals in their area. We scan through all the articles published within the past week and pick out the most interesting two articles. A picking session occurs mid-week and we spend about 1-2 hours to read and write about the selected article. The criteria for Research Highlights are not as stringent as selecting papers for publication. They are meant to highlight a new idea or interesting preliminary findings published in other journals. Sometimes they are papers that we would publish and sometimes they are not. So, if you want to get into our radar, post your most recent publication on our network group. We will most definitely see it!"
Why would a researcher who has access to most journals himself be bothered to submit a paper to an open access journal and pay the publication costs when there are similarly ranked “closed” journals that are supported by subscriptions and cheaper to submit to? So asks Eva Amsen at Expression Patterns blog. The question has led, inevitably, to a lively comment thread.
Andrew Hudson-Smith, one of the newer bloggers at Nature Network, writes at his blog Urban Nature: "Blogging research thoughts and outcomes to me at least seems the most natural thing in the world, after all the current buzz around universities is outreach and breaking down silos. As such, Web 2.0, with its shared videos via services such as YouTube; its virtual environments such as Second Life; and real-time research updates via Twitter have all been welcomed and indeed become central to my work. The embracing of Web 2.0 by academics is not however universal and by many it can be viewed as trivialising research." (Some pros and cons have been discussed recently at Peer to Peer.)
