Nautilus

From my colleagues in the Nature press office:

British broadcaster Sir David Attenborough presents his views on Charles Darwin, natural selection, and how the Bible has put the natural world in peril in an exclusive interview for Nature Video.
Talking about his new programme "Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life", to be broadcast on BBC One on 1 February 2009, Attenborough singles out the book of Genesis as the root cause of man's exploitation and devastation of the planet, and explains that evolution is vitally important because it inextricably places man as part of the natural world. He also gives a personal insight into his 50-year career as a science broadcaster and life-long campaigner for evolution.
Access the video free on Nature’s YouTube site.

Nature' s YouTube video channel index page is here, from which you can access our other videos, also free.

Nature's video archive at the journal website.

Nature's multimedia index page.

David Attenborough's recent troubles with creationists are described at End of the Pier Show, the personal blog of Nature senior editor Henry Gee, and at The Great Beyond (Nature's science news blog).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 30, 2009
Categories: Author services, Communication, Partners | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

It’s not exactly easy to get funded in science, writes Steffi Suhr at her blog Science Behind the Scenes. "Those who do are, to a large extent, lucky (on top of being hopefully very good). In this time of financial crisis, there will be even more scientists who have to consider ‘alternative careers’, and not all of them will do this by choice." Further discussion follows.

Jennifer Rohn "dallies with both sides" in a typically engaging post on her blog Mind the Gap about her experiences dealing with the journal office over a review article she is writing. Being a scientist, then an editor, and now a scientist again provides a particular perspective on the process that can be used to good advantage when asked to meet a publication deadline. Again characteristically for this blog, a large number of comments follow - many about the experience of submitting to, writing for, and being edited by, journals.

How useful is online networking to scientists, asks Richard Grant on The Scientist blog - no substitute for meeting in person? There is a stimulating discussion of these points, but here I highlight a comment by David Crotty on the question of time management." How much of your time as a scientist should be spent networking? It seems to me that it’s a minor part of the job, at least compared with doing the actual research and raising funding. Which is more important to you, doing the experiments, writing up the paper for Nature, getting a grant to pay your postdocs or chatting up other scientists? Networking is important, to be sure, but it’s meaningless without the actual work being done in the lab behind it.....Social networks for scientists and meet-ups like Science Online do a lovely job of putting together people who are really interested in science networking, people for whom this is a priority. ... For the average working scientist though, are they really going to spend that much time blogging when they could be running more experiments? Are they going to spend the time and money to come to a meeting on networking when they could instead go to a meeting in their field and do some actual networking? I’ll ask you and your commenters, what percentage of one’s working day/week should be spent on networking and doing things like blogging as compared to things like doing actual research, reading the literature, securing funding, faculty duties like committees, meeting with one’s students/postdocs/PI, teaching,etc.?"

Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Planet Nature
Nature.com's science blogs index and tracker
Nature Network's many blogs and forums
Science Online FriendFeed room.

Previous Nature Network columns.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 30, 2009
Categories: Nature Network round-up | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Nature 457, 379; 2009.
Jay M. Pasachoff of California Institute of Technology writes: Albert Ruggi's suspicions about the process by which the offspring of professors are deemed to be the best candidates for new positions may well be justified (Nature 456, 870; 2008). On the other hand, a few rare families just do produce generations of eminent scientists. For example, there are at least seven parent–child pairs of Nobel laureates.
Four of these were in physics: the Thomsons (J. J. in 1906 and George in 1937), Braggs (William and Lawrence together in 1915), Bohrs (Niels in 1922 and his son Aage in 1975) and Siegbahns (Manne in 1924 and his son Kai in 1981). Marie Curie and her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie both won the Nobel prize in Chemistry (1911 and 1935), after Marie and her husband, Pierre, had won the physics Nobel in 1903.
The Kornbergs branched out more (Arthur, physiology or medicine, 1959; Roger, chemistry, 2006), as did Hans von Euler-Chelpin (chemistry, 1929) and his son Ulf von Euler (physiology or medicine, 1970).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 29, 2009
Categories: Awards | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Reviews Molecular and Cell Biology presents a free poster on the productions and actions of small RNAs (ribonucleic acids), by V. Narry Kim and Mikiko C. Siomi. Recent progress in cloning, deep sequencing and bioinformatics have revealed an astounding landscape of small RNAs in eukaryotic cells. Small (20–30-nucleotide) RNAs, in association with Argonaute-family proteins, target messenger (m)RNAs and chromatin, and thereby keep both the genome and the transcriptome under extensive surveillance. The poster depicts our current understanding of the processing pathways of eukaryotic small RNAs and their possible mechanisms of action, and accompanies the Review article 'Biogenesis of small RNAs in animals' by V. Narry Kim, Jinju Han and Mikiko C. Siomi in the February issue of Nature Reviews Molecular and Cell Biology (10, 126-139; 2009).

High-resolution PDF of the poster.
Futher reading about productions and actions of small RNAs.
Nature Reviews Molecular and Cell Biology article series on post-transcriptional control.
See also Nature's Insight on RNA silencing, in the 22 January issue (Nature 457, 395-433; 2009). This collection of five Review articles is free to access online.
Nature Publishing Group RNAi (RNA interference) gateway.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 28, 2009
Categories: Author benefits, Disciplines | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Chemical Biology is offering new content and functionality to authors. Online enhancements to the chemistry functionality are described here, with examples. And the journal is also introducing Primers, a series of peer-reviewed, one-page summaries of chemical or biological topics designed to jump-start readers' ability to comprehend research in a particular area. Green fluorescent protein is the topic of this Primer, if you would like to take a look at the format. (See here for further information about this particular Primer.)
In the February 2009 issue (Nature Chem. Biol. 5, 61; 2009), the editors offer further guidelines and tips for authors submitting their research to the journal, following on from previous Editorials (Nature Chem. Biol. 4, 715; 2008 and 5, 1; 2009). In the February Editorial, the editors answer common questions:
Do you actually read cover letters?
Should I submit a Brief Communication or an Article?
What do I need to submit?
Must my manuscript be perfectly formatted?
Are presubmission inquiries useful?
How are papers assigned to editors?

Nature Chemical Biology guide to authors.
About the Nature Chemical Biology editors.
Nature journals' website for authors and referees.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 27, 2009
Categories: Authorship, Feedback | Permalink | Comments (0)

Roy Welch and Laura Welch of Syracuse University, New York, examine why researchers seem reluctant to be more directly involved in the annotation of microbial genomes in the February issue of Nature Reviews Microbiology (7, 90; 2009). They write:

"To annotate an organism's genome, biological information about the organism must be matched to the genes and genetic elements in the sequenced genome. The process is iterative and open-ended: new information is constantly incorporated into the annotation. It can also be recursive: analysis of the annotation may provide insight about the organism that in turn leads to changes to the annotation. Unfortunately, the generation of new information and annotation of the genome are at present completely separate processes. Often new information does not become incorporated into the annotation in a timely manner, a costly loss for those who rely on it to advance their research.
The community of expert researchers who study an organism produce most of the information that becomes part of the annotation and are also the primary group of end-users. It is therefore curious that the annotation process is circuitous and inefficient: researchers communicate new information not as direct updates to the annotation, but as research papers that must later be interpreted and incorporated into the annotation separately — most often by a third party! Indeed, some information never finds its way into the annotation. It would be far more efficient for the research community to contribute directly to genome annotation. Yet the life science community as a whole remains stuck in the old, inefficient paradigm."

The authors go on to argue that technology is not the impediment, given the wide availability of wikis (collaborative editing websites) and the databases that have been created using these technologies, including EcoliWiki, GONUTS, Myxopedia and Wikipathways. Rather, state the authors, the impediment seems to be sociological: until contributions to a genome-annotation collaborative information repository can be credited by inclusion in a PhD thesis, curriculum vitae, tenure application or grant proposal, direct collaborative annotations are unlikely to fulfil their promise and potential to accelerate scientific achievement.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 26, 2009
Categories: Access, Data availability | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Mike Fowler muses on the age-old (fossil illustration included) dilemmas not only of keeping up with the current literature, but also how young scientists can get to grips with all the old literature. He pictures this problem as an upside down pyramid.

Access to information and filtering out the important information are also topics addressed by Martin Fenner in the context of medical research, in a post rehearsing the author's contribution to last week's ScienceOnline09 conference. He writes: "There are many reasons why people are interested in reporting or learning about medical research. But betroffenheit [see his post for a definition] and financial interests are two very strong reasons that should always be kept in mind. "

Ai Lin Chun, a senior editor at Nature Nanotechnology, shares with readers of the Asia-Pacific and beyond forum some tips on the types of things one would learn in an editorial job. Her post is intended to help those interested in editorial jobs to reflect if these activities are things that really interest them, and if they are skills that people want to build.

For scientists interested in starting a blog, here are some words in a comment from Stephen Curry: "Maybe it’s too easy to forget what it was like before you jumped in. I had been mulling over starting a blog for about a year before I actually got started. I even did a hidden dry run on Blogger to see what it would feel like. However, starting for real on Blogger didn’t seem feasible – I couldn’t see how the blog would ever get noticed. Only when I discovered Nature Network (NN), first as a reader, then a commenter did an opportunity begin to emerge: it had a ready-made audience with strong scientific interests. But only by attending the conference in London last August (which itself took a little gumption) did I realise that pitching in might not be too horrendous. And now, looking back, I think “What was I worried about?” But I imagine there are plenty of others out there who have similar concerns that they haven’t yet worked through. Hopefully they will see the friendliness of NN as genuine and dip a toe in the water. It’s not that cold. Really." If you are tempted, you can start the process at Nature Network here. As Eva Amsen writes, the entire Internet turns out to be a small, even friendly, village.

Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Planet Nature
Nature.com's science blogs index and tracker
Nature Network's many blogs and forums
Science Online FriendFeed room.

Previous Nature Network columns.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 23, 2009
Categories: Nature Network round-up | Permalink | Comments (0)

Four postdoctoral researchers have been writing their diaries over the past year in NatureJobs. In the first 2009 issue of Nature, they offer parting thoughts on a year of personal and professional milestones.
NatureJobs editor Gene Russo writes:
At a time when financial markets are shaky, science career opportunities uncertain and the plight of the serial postdoc as much of a concern as ever, this year's Postdoc Journal keepers offer hope. In the past few months two of them have earned permanent positions. One has embarked on the challenge of motherhood. The fourth has found a research position that, although immensely challenging, always enthralls her. Each sums up their experiences and future ambitions in online essays (free to access).
Jon Yearsley, a veritable postdoc-aholic of ten years' experience, managed to live up to one of his New Year's resolutions from last year: to have a permanent position or no position at all. He recently landed a lecturing job in Dublin and was joined by his partner after much time apart. Of course, challenges remain: will his brand of interdisciplinary research attract funding? What about students?
New responsibilities have proven daunting for Zachary Lippman, who has just moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York as an assistant professor after a postdoc in Israel. He knows he must generate preliminary data and write grant proposals, but he remains wistful about his past experiences and colleagues.
Aliza le Roux started the year with a research trek of epic proportions. She went from her native South Africa to her new principal investigator's lab at Michigan State University before, in short order, heading to Ethiopia for her new postdoc. She is fascinated every day by the natural soap opera performed by a troop of baboons she studies there. Le Roux loves her job, she says unabashedly. She gets to play with animals and chase her own intellectual questions. But she worries that her work might make a 'normal' life a difficult prospect.
Amanda Goh, on the other hand, has taken a step towards that so-called normal life. Goh became quite frustrated with her lab work this year; she contemplated starting a completely new project. Now, as she prepares for the birth of her first child, she already recognizes that the careful planning she strives for in the lab may be even more difficult to carry out in the nursery.
NatureJobs archive of articles for postdocs and students.
NatureJobs home - includesfree scientific job search and free job postings.
Careers advice by NatureJobs forum at Nature Network.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 22, 2009
Categories: Careers | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mauno Vihinen of the University of Tampere, Finland, issued a warning about plagiarism-detection systems in Nature's Correspondence pages recently (Nature 457, 26; 2009):
Sophisticated tools have been developed to detect duplicate publication and plagiarism, as noted in M. Errani and H. Garner's Commentary 'A tale of two citations' (Nature 451, 397–399; 2008) and in your News story 'Entire-paper plagiarism caught by software' (Nature 455, 715; 2008). To my surprise, one of these tools, Déjà vu, classifies four of our publications as unverified duplicates. These report the analysis of Bruton's tyrosine kinase mutations associated with the rare disease X-linked agammaglobulinaemia (XLA) and of the database BTKbase.
Each of these is a genuinely different and independent report; they cover the development of the database and different analyses of the growing data set. The reason why they are branded as suspect cases is probably that the journal Nucleic Acids Research, in which three of them were published, has a special format for articles in their annual database issue.
Between 1995 and 2006, we published eight articles on BTKbase. The number of XLA cases recorded in the database has grown from 118 to 1,111 during this period. Several colleagues who maintain databases are also listed in Déjà vu. It is worrying that such legitimate articles written by research infrastructure developers and providers are labelled as unethical, just because of some overlap with previous papers as a result of a journal's strict formatting requirement.
Detection of fraud, including duplications, is obviously crucial to the integrity of science. But it is unethical to list thousands of scientists in a public Internet service as suspects, without verifying the claims that are being made. Although the developers indicate that the data are provisional, there is still a risk that the listing will affect decisions on careers, promotions or research funding if individual cases are not investigated.
No professional scientist wants even the slightest suspicion of fraud to tarnish their scholarly reputation, so listed cases need to be closely investigated. To detect real duplicates, the full-length articles must be analysed, not just the abstracts — which occurred in the case of our publications.
The Nature journals' policies on plagiarism.
Nature journals' policies on publication ethics.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 21, 2009
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chris Toumey of the University of South Carolina asks, in a Thesis article in the January issue of Nature Nanotechnology (4, 5-6; 2009) "where does nanotechnology fit into arguments about the two cultures? Much has changed since 1959, and now we have bright and sincere people from both the sciences and the humanities who want good science and good values in nanotechnology. My favourite example is an eminent scientist at my university who says repeatedly that scientists will have the first word on the future of nanotechnology, but non-scientists will have the last word. Thus does he invite — even dare — non-scientists to claim a place in nanotechnology policy."
The author goes on to discuss some of the ideas espoused in the book Nanovision, by Colin Milburn of the English department of the University of California, Davis. Rather than dismissing some of the book's ideas about the "transcendent" world that may result from the synthesis of new and powerful technologies, Toumey argues that scientists need to address the issues raised about their professional disciplines by those outside the profession, even if this does mean getting to grips with science fiction as well as the terminology of literary theory. He concludes: "It is unlikely C. P. Snow could have imagined that the humanities and social sciences could do to science what science does to nature. But sometimes they can. And when they can, they subvert the divide between the two cultures. Aren't these new cultures preferable to the "two cultures"?"

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 20, 2009
Categories: Communication, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

Citations are an important component in the assessment of academic performance. Yet the growing literature, combined with format constraints of journals, encourage citation of reviews in preference to primary research. This diverts academic credit from the discoverer. (From the January Editorial of Nature Cell Biology 11, 1; 2009, free to access online)
This Editorial notes that of the research articles in the journal's previous issue, one-quarter of the citations were to reviews. Authors tend to cite reviews because of the print constraints of most journals, hence citing reviews often allows an author to use one citation to cite a group of primary research papers. Further, as Nature Cell Biology points out, "ISI (Thomson Scientific) continues to lump together citations of primary research papers and reviews. This has had a major impact on researchers and indeed journals: it boosts cumulative citations of the former, while providing papers that tend to be well-cited for the latter to beef up journal impact factors. We have argued previously for a disambiguation of primary and review citations.
An additional consideration is that in the current highly competitive world of cell biology, some researchers may be tempted to obfuscate the state of the field to enhance the apparent conceptual advance provided by their study. Rather than omitting a citation altogether, a less onerous approach may be to support a vague statement by citing a general review."
Nature Cell Biology is addressing these issues by increasing the reference limits in papers by 40%. Authors can now cite up to 70 references, rather than 50, in Articles; 40 instead of 30 in Letters, and 20 in Brief Communications. The journal strongly encourages authors to cite the primary literature where appropriate. Reviews are the only effective way to provide background information on whole fields or more focused topics with a considerable literature, but citations to the primary literature are essential for referring to specific findings.

See a related announcement in The EMBO Journal.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 19, 2009
Categories: Citation analysis | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Just imagine 5 clinical trials with a new drug where one trial will show an advantage for the new treatment, writes Martin Fenner. "This trial will be published in a nice journal, probably one negative trial will be published in a small journal and the remaining 3 trials will remain unpublished. Just looking at the published literature will of course give the wrong impression, but these are the only data that are available to most people." Martin goes on to outline the ways in which 'science is shouted about', from the perspective of a drug company, an insurer, the media and the patient.

If you are in Toronto on 26 January, drop in for the Nature Network pub night. Eva Amsen provides a taster of the agenda. And from 12 to 15 February, Bob O'Hara notes that participating bloggers around the world will be celebrating the bicentennary of Charles Darwin’s birth (12 February 1809) with a 'blog swarm', in which posts will be aggregated on Blog for Darwin to be kept as a resource for educators, students, and others - all are welcome to join in.

Are scientists good at making decisions? So questions Craig Rowell, who writes: "I would like this to be a fairly serious and critical look at the process of decision making by Scientists and if there is anything of inherent value or is there anything lacking in how we train scientists to make decisions." Read his post and contribute your own answers.

Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Planet Nature
Nature.com's science blogs index and tracker
Nature Network's many blogs and forums
Science Online FriendFeed room.

Previous Nature Network columns.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 16, 2009
Categories: Nature Network round-up | Permalink | Comments (0)

One or two changes for authors and readers are announced in the January issue of Nature Photonics (3, 1; 2009). The journal's design has been revitalized by updating its fonts, removing unwanted white space and creating a new fresh look that presents information in a clearer, more concise fashion. The result is a journal with a look that is easier to read and navigate. The editors report:
"We've also taken the opportunity to make a few other changes. To bring us in line with other Nature research journals in the physical sciences its time to say goodbye to "This issue" and "Photonics at NPG". At the same time, we've expanded our Technology Focus supplement in 2009 with longer, industry-perspective pieces; a double-page spread of research highlights; and the addition of a profile piece describing the activities of a young, emerging firm in the relevant area. The aim is to provide a more concentrated and in-depth insight into an important technology within photonics that has a strong application and industrial focus. In 2009, we will be running four such Technology Focus supplements on the topics of semiconductor light sources, materials processing, imaging and organic photonics. The first of these — semiconductor light sources — appears this month and brings together a collection of articles on the topics of quantum cascade lasers (QCLs), long-wavelength vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, quantum-dot lasers and tapered-laser diodes, as well as an update on the business and product news in the sector.
Following the positive feedback on our August 2008 special focus on slow light, we have plans for several more focus issues in 2009, and of course we will continue our programme of regular review articles throughout the year.
We are also busy with preparations for another Nature Photonics conference that will take place in Tokyo on 20–22 October 2009 on future perspectives for photovoltaics. This will be our second event and follows our successful 2007 conference on the future of optical communications. A website for the 2009 event is currently being designed, and we will update you when it's ready and the programme of speakers has been finalized."
Nature Photonics journal homepage.
Guide to authors of Nature Photonics.
Nature Photonics focus archive.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 15, 2009
Categories: Authorship, Publications | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the genetics field as well as others, an increasing number of research papers are the products of research consortia. In its January Editorial, Nature Genetics (41, 1; 2009) reports on how the journal is coping with the effects of team knowledge production on publication, and advises authors of what they can do to expedite the publication of their work.
One of several points made in the Editorial is that "Scientific productivity is rapidly increasing thanks to collaboration, and this has created a greater need for communication and coordination. In response, publishers have now begun to offer researchers customized unique contributor identification services such as ResearcherID. However, we recognize that it would be unrealistic to expect something as central as individual identity and reputation to be definitively provided or controlled by any organization. What is really needed is a database or convention of online contributor identity, controlled by knowledge producers themselves, a service that records consortium membership with dates of joining and leaving, roles within consortia and authoring groups, and funding sources."
Nature Genetics guide to authors.
The Nature journals' policies on authorship.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 14, 2009
Categories: Authorship, Publishing | Permalink | Comments (0)

One year has passed since Nature Geoscience presented its first issue to the public, yet for the journal's editors the excitement of seeing each monthly issue composed in print and online has not worn off. They are delighted to note the public's interest in the geosciences: "even the James Bond villain now deals in water, not nuclear weapons, and our articles have been reported in outlets ranging from the Metro (a free London newspaper) to the New York Times.
We have learned a lot about planet Earth and other planetary bodies over the past year. For that, we would particularly like to thank all our authors and referees — their contributions to the journal are highly valued.
To celebrate the first complete annual cycle of Nature Geoscience issues, we are pleased to present free online access to our favourite pieces, assembled entirely subjectively. This compilation is intended to give an idea of the spread of topics and formats we publish; more can, of course, be found in the full issues.
We look forward to receiving and publishing further interesting papers, opinionated commentaries, learned overviews and last, but not least, adventurous backstories. We hope you too look forward to reading more about the geosciences in 2009 and beyond."
From Nature Geoscience 2, 1 (2009).
First anniversary highlights from the journal (free to access online).
Nature Geoscience guide to authors.
Submit your manuscript to Nature Geoscience.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 13, 2009
Categories: Author services | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Reviews Molecular and Cell Biology presents a special Focus on mechanotransduction — on a range of topics from how cells sense mechanical forces in different tissues to how these mechanical forces are transduced into biochemical signals — in development, normal physiology and disease. Cells sense their physical three-dimensional environment — properties of the extracellular matrix, neighbouring cells and physical stress — by translating mechanical forces and deformations into biochemical signals. In turn, these signals can adjust cellular and extracellular structure. This mechanosensitive feedback modulates cellular functions as diverse as proliferation, differentiation, migration and apoptosis, and is crucial for organ development and homeostasis. Any molecular defect that interrupts or alters this chain of mechanical sensing and subsequent cell signalling events could perturb the normal cellular function and potentially lead to diverse diseases such as loss of hearing, cardiovascular disease, muscular dystrophy and cancer.
The Focus is free to access for the month of January 2009.
See also Milestones in Cytoskeleton, and request a free print copy here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 12, 2009
Categories: Author benefits, NPG special content | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Erika Cule picks up on a paper in Science addressing whether peer discussion could improve student performance on in-class questions, even when none of the students in the discussion group know the answer, via a technology similar to that used for "ask the audience" sections of the TV show 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire'. Erika wonders whether students could learn more from each other by collaborative problem-solving, than they could from a conventional lecture.

In the Nature Nanotechnology - Asia Pacific and beyond forum, editor Ai Lin Chun describes the pleasures of meeting scientists and hearing their stories, which she is able to do as part of her job. One such scientist is Dan Peer, who was a postdoc at Harvard Medical School when he published a review article in Nature Nanotechnology, and who is now head of the Laboratory of Nanomedicine at the Centre for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Tel Aviv University. Dan writes in the forum about his experiences of nanotechnology research in a country at war.

Nature Network bloggers have made a strong showing in Open Laboratory 2008, this year's anthology of science blog posts, writes Corie Lok, Nature Network's Editor. Six of the 50 selected posts are by Nature Network bloggers: the posts and links to them can be accessed here. The editors are currently compiling the posts into a book.

On reading Darwin's Origin of Species, Bob O'Hara came across this passage: "So again with the varieties of sheep: it has been asserted that certain mountain-varieties will starve out other mountain-varieties, so that they cannot be kept together. The same result has followed from keeping together different varieties of the medicinal leech." This prompts him to ask how medicinal leeches are kept when they are not used. Answers in the comments to his post, please.

Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Planet Nature
Nature.com's science blogs index and tracker
Nature Network's many blogs and forums
Science Online FriendFeed room.

Previous Nature Network columns.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 09, 2009
Categories: Nature Network round-up | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Thomson Reuters are holding a joint seminar on publishing excellence and how to correctly interpret journal citation data on 23 January 2009 in Sydney, Australia. This seminar will go into detail about the use and misuse of impact factors along with a presentation by senior editor Leslie Sage on how to get published in Nature.
Four speakers will present on the following:
Antoine Bocquet, Associate Director, NPG Asia-Pacific:
Growth of Nature Publishing Group
Dr Leslie Sage, senior editor, physical sciences, Nature :
How to publish a paper in Nature
Dr Berenika M Webster, strategic business manager, Thomson Reuters Scientific, Asia Pacific:
About use and misuse of impact factor and other citation metrics
Dr Dugald McGlashan, associate publisher, Asian journals, NPG:
Developments in author and reader services in a changing publishing landscape
This seminar is free to attend and open to those interested in publishing in Nature titles and journal citation data.
See here for more information, details of the venue, and to reserve your place.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 08, 2009
Categories: Author benefits, Citation analysis, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is the text of an announcement in Nature 457, 8; 1 January 2009:
About a year ago, an Editorial in these pages urged scientists and their institutions to 'spread the word' and highlight reasons why scientists can treat evolution by natural selection as, in effect, an established fact (see Nature 451, 108; 2008).
This week we are following our own prescription. Readers will find a freely accessible resource for biologists and others who wish to explain to students, friends or loved ones just what is the evidence for evolution by natural selection. Entitled '15 evolutionary gems', the document summarizes 15 lines of evidence from papers published in Nature over the past 10 years. The evidence is drawn from the fossil record, from studies of natural and artificial habitats, and from research on molecular biological processes.
In a year in which Darwin is being celebrated amid uncertainty and hostility about his ideas among citizens, being aware of the cumulatively incontrovertible evidence for those ideas is all the more important. We trust that this document will help.

Nature's Darwin 200 Special collection.

Related posts:
Eugenie Scott of the US National Center for Science Education.
Brandon Kiem at Wired Science.
P. Z. Myers of Pharyngula.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 07, 2009
Categories: Education, NPG special content, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (1)

This is the text of a Correspondence to Nature (456, 870; 2008) by William Burns of the University of Queensland.

Search engines are invaluable for finding out about the latest research but, thanks to publishers' efforts to digitize back issues of scientific journals, we can now also search deep into the past. And what turns up isn't necessarily pretty.
In the CAB (Centre for Agricultural Bioscience) abstracts database, for example, I found more than 100 articles written by the discredited Soviet geneticist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. One of his most astounding reports, in a 1947 issue of the journal Literaturnaya Gazeta, declaimed that: "intraspecific competition does not occur... the opposition of bourgeois geneticists to this theory is attributed to their desire to justify capitalist exploitation, which is essentially a struggle within the human species".
Another search, using Web of Knowledge, brought up hundreds of Chinese scientific articles from the decades after Mao Zedong came to power in 1949, with titles such as 'Chairman Mao's brilliant philosophic thought guides me in winning triple cropping with high yield' (Li K. C. Sci. China Ser. A 20, 391–391; 1977).
Also using Web of Knowledge, I came upon 70 research papers by Claus Schilling, the Nazi war criminal who conducted medical experiments on prisoners in Dachau concentration camp. None of his wartime research is in the database but, as I scrolled through the record of his publications, I found myself looking for the point at which he had gone wrong.
These examples stand in contrast with the high-minded official version of science history that we read in textbooks. As Thomas Kuhn remarked in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Univ. Chicago Press, 1962), science is like Big Brother's society in George Orwell's 1984 — constantly rewriting history to show itself in the best light.
But will this censorship be possible when every politically motivated, unethical and demonstrably incorrect scientific article breaks out from dusty library storerooms to appear online? How will anyone be able to believe that science is an honest quest for truth, when its inglorious past is a mouse click away?

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 06, 2009
Categories: Communication | Permalink | Comments (3)

Nature Materials starts the new year with a rousing editorial in its January edition (Nat. Mater. 8, 1; 2009) on the importance of innovation: "we cannot afford reductions in fundamental research or to be complacent on issues such as the energy crisis. The lesson from the recent financial meltdown seems straightforward. If we do not understand the risks we are exposed to and cover ourselves against them, the long-term implications might be grim. Unlike the banks and their complex financial instruments, which even proved too complex for sophisticated risk-assessment computer models, the gamble we are taking with our planet is painfully clear."
According to the editorial, the energy crisis and global warming need immediate action if we are to avoid significant costs and serious implications. "Even though public budgets are badly strained, it is clear that we have to take a long-term approach and cannot afford to reduce our spending on fundamental research. Budget cuts and hiring freezes are anything but a solution. We must equip our academic system with sufficient funds to push ahead fundamental research in areas such as clean energy technologies." The journal hopes "that 2009 will mark a turning point, not only for the economy, but also in our approach to science policy and science funding."

See also in the same issue of the journal (Nat. Mater. 8, 3-4; 2009) an interview with Joseph Michels, a managing director at One Equity Partners, who talks to Nature Materials editor Joerg Heber about making private equity investments in high-tech companies in times of recession.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 05, 2009
Categories: Careers, Support | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

At a time of year when many publications are listing "top ten" scientific discoveries of the past 12 months, Hank Campbell has a different perspective in his "top 20 science stories of 2008" post: an alarming decrease in available clichés to describe what scientists think about new discoveries.

Eva Amsen writes a thoughtful essay entitled "Failure", at her Nature Network blog Expression Patterns. She argues that the unit of publication is the basic measure of 'success' for a scientist, and hence that not publishing is perceived as a sign of failure. Publishing or perishing has driven some to extreme measures, not least of which (in the political science literature in any event) is a strange distribution of reported P values. If the production of exciting data is the only way by which a scientist can be judged as successful, what of all the things that get left out? Journals for negative results may be one part of the answer, but the question remains of what is the best way to assess the quality of science and scientists.

Previous Nature Network columns.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 02, 2009
Categories: Nature Network round-up | Permalink | Comments (0)