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.
"What can print copies offer that online access cannot?", asks Nature Nanotechnology editor Ai Lin Chun. Wen Jiang provides one answer in an online reply: "When I grasped the last printed copy of the March 2008 Nature Nanotechnology issue at the MRS conference in San Francisco this year, I felt that I had won the jackpot! Although more and more scientific journals are becoming fully digitalized, the printed format holds a longer-lasting sentimental value for the student authors publishing in the journal, similar to having a “Collector’s Edition”."
Richard Grant is the latest to address the complex question of the motivation of scientists to communicate their work to the public, sometimes "to encourage children to become scientists—or at least convince them that science is important—other times it’s to secure our funding, or explain why there’s no link between the measles vaccine and autism, or why GM crops are better for us and the environment. Other times it’s because we want to persuade people with treatable diseases to take this drug and live, rather than go to a homeopath and die." And have those encouraging clear writing in scientific papers thought about issues such as the one Richard provides in his post? "Here’s an example: [Butterflies] were subjected while being held by hand to hindwing removal. (The hindwing was severed with scissors along a line just distal to the point of articulation of the hindwings with the thorax, so that only a small triangular flap of each hind wing remained). Here’s the same sentence, rewritten so that my daughters can understand it: We cut the back wings off butterflies." Please join the discussion if you can help address this conundrum.
Eva Amsen, on the other hand, provides some good news about scientific papers, specifically the performance of the students on her science-writing course. Although one of the welcome pieces of news is that students are using the active voice in preference to the passive, Linda Cooper comments that "[teaching assistants] at my university still deduct marks from lab reports when students use the active voice. Such a pity because in addition to draining the life out of a sentence, the passive construction encourages writers to overuse weak linking verbs (variations on the verb “to be”), nominalizations (noun forms of verbs), prepositional phrases, and imprecise terms. While the passive voice is useful in making transitions between sentences, scientific articles written largely in the passive voice are often boring to read (and to write, i imagine!). My guess is that many researchers have difficulty transforming passive sentences into active ones – one more good reason for them to take science writing courses!"
Writing aside, "how do you read scientific papers?" asks Anna Kushnir, after reading a blog entry by Chris Lasher. "How do you read papers? Only look at the figures? Skip the intro? Have you read (really read, comprehended, and retained) every paper you have cited in your own publications?" As the number of papers and other reading material inexorably increases year-on-year, a reading strategy is essential to keep up to date without being swamped.
Joerg Heber, a senior editor at Nature Materials, asks whether, in the light of current economic concerns, there "will be an impact for some web 2.0 initiatives in science, where funding might become more difficult in the near future. For example, should we worry about long-term funding for initiatives such as open notebook science, where data volumes might be rather high? Or is there no reason for concern at all?" Bob O'Hara responds: "I can’t see that the recession will hit Web 2.0 initiatives in science, partly because we’re buffered (to some extent) against the “real” economy, but also because we’re generally not using Web 2.0 to make money, our motivation is to improve the way we do science." Further views are welcome at the Nature Network publishing forum.
Every Thursday at 11am PDT, writes Joanna Scott, the Nature Podcast will be broadcast at the rooftop cafe on the Elucian Islands, Nature’s home in Second Life. "It is completely free and anyone is welcome to come and listen to the Podcast and chat with other science enthusiasts......I’m also wondering about having a later listening as well, perhaps in the evening PDT. I know some people are missing out on everything – anyone with any comment to make about timezones or scheduling, please do get in touch" via her Nature Network Second Life blog.
Previous Nature Network columns.
