Nautilus

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.

The pros and cons of that most informal kind of scientific authorship, blogging, have been mulled over again at Nature Network during the past week. Katherine Haxton summarizes a talk she has just given with the title "Can science blogging enhance your research life?", briefly describing the history of the medium, explaining what a blog is, and identifying several uses of blogging, including researchblogging.org , Jean-Claude Bradley’s Useful Molecules , Nature Network and Rosie Redfield’s Research blogs (links are in Katherine's post, together with a link to her slide presentation). Eva Amsen is similarly preparing a talk and asks Nature Network users what they think are the benefits of blogging to scientists. Some very interesting discussion ensues. I think the clearest contribution to this particular conversation in favour of blogging is from Katherine: "scientists must do better at outreach and communication. Scientists must lower the barriers between their profession and the rest of society. Scientists must get their own positive publicity and information out there because no one else is doing it for us. Blogging is a means of engaging with a wider scientific audience." Indeed, researchers should blog more than they do, according to an Editorial in Nature this week, subject of further discussion at the Nature Opinion forum on Nature Network.

Moving on from blogs but remaining online, Caryn Shechtman reports on a panel session at Columbia University on whether open science is good for research. Open science holds that all data are free and public; and that results and methods can be portrayed in various web-based media. Although there are risks, the consensus of the Columbia panel was that open science has many more advantages than disadvantages, both of which are described further by Caryn in her post, and addressed in the discussion that follows.

Another topic of perennial interest to scientists as authors is that of how their work is cited and how those citations are measured and used to assess their performance. Noah Gray provides an entertaining response, in the form of an intereview with Dr Obvious, to a recent study on the effect of "open access" publication on citation rates. And the advantages and disadvantages of tagging one's citations and libraries are throroughly dissected by Thomas Kluyver in the citation in science forum, and in the web 2.0 forum, in which opposing views expressed in blog posts by David Crotty and William Gunn are featured.

A post in the Nature Publishing Group News forum notes that the first papers in the company's latest journal, Nature Chemistry, are now published online (AOP). Via this forum post, you can read an account by the Chief Editor of the journal, Stuart Cantrill, describing why NPG is launching Nature Chemistry, how the journal might affect the chemistry publishing community, his vision for the journal, how it might be different from other chemistry journals, and more. A free sample copy of the journal can be ordered at the Nature Chemistry website, where you can also submit your work to the journal, and find out more information and news about what's in store when the first printed issue is available in April.

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.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 27, 2009
Categories: Nature Network round-up | Permalink | Comments (0)

Classical and emerging infectious diseases, viral pandemics, and drug-resistant pathogens remain challenges to human health. However, contemporary advances in genetics and genomic technologies provide new approaches to understanding and combating these diseases. The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) and the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO) are partnering with Nature Publishing Group (NPG) to organize an international conference to discuss how the genomes, unique biologies, and interactions of both host and pathogen are being revealed using novel genomic technologies, and how this information can and will translate into disease management and therapies. This conference, from 21 to 24 March 2009, at the Ritz Carlton Millenia Hotel, Singapore, will engage basic and clinical scientists, including human geneticists, genome scientists, computational biologists, and experts in pathogenic microbial agents, to chart the effects of genomics on questions in global infectious disease management.
Organizers; Aravinda Chakravarti (American Society of Human Genetics, USA) ; Jeremy Farrar (Hospital for Tropical Diseases, Viet Nam) ; Louisa Flintoft (Nature Reviews Genetics, UK); Chris Gunter (HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, USA); Edison Liu (Human Genome Organisation, Singapore); and Magdalena Skipper (Nature, UK).

Website for conference on gentics and genomics of infectious diseases.

List of speakers.

Register here for this conference.

More about location and accommodation.

About the organizers.

Nature Conferences: programme for 2009.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 26, 2009
Categories: Conferences, Partners | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Editorial in the March issue of Nature Immunology (10, 225; 2009) addresses the vexed question of plagiarism: what it is, and what funders are doing about it when it is discovered. From the Editorial:

Publishers, too, are taking steps to combat the rise of plagiarism and to protect the intellectual property rights of their authors. Internet-based search tools have been developed to detect potential cases of plagiarism. Online publication has also facilitated the creation of a textual database, called 'CrossRef', where published content can be deposited and annotated by various 'meta tags'. Nature Publishing Group and over 40 other publishers, as participating members of CrossRef, routinely deposit published papers into this database. In 2008, the developers of CrossRef also launched a service called CrossCheck, which uses the iThenticate Internet-based tool developed by iParadigms to compare a selected paper with the entire database to assess textual similarity. Akin to a search of a protein or nucleic acid database, textual similarity scores are reported after the search program is run, and the context of the similarity can be displayed so that the user (in this case, an editor) can further inspect those manuscripts deemed 'suspect'. The incorporation of such tools into the normal editorial workflow should help diminish the likelihood of plagiarism in manuscripts that might otherwise have passed peer review. Nature Publishing Group journals will be using this tool to scrutinize manuscripts selected for publication.
Still, the onus is on mentors and laboratory chiefs to serve as examples of good scientific conduct. They should initiate discussions about what constitutes plagiarism and 'self plagiarism', as well as other forms of misconduct, with their trainees. Mentors should recognize their obligation to help trainees to develop and hone good written communication skills that follow high ethical standards. Likewise, colleagues, referees and editors all must accept their responsibility to safeguard scientific literature against the possibility of plagiarism or dual publication. Scientific integrity includes the ability to acknowledge good ideas and to give proper credit due to original authors.

The Nature journals' policies on plagiarism are here.

The Nature journals' policies on duplicate publication are here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 25, 2009
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

To help celebrate two notable anniversaries this year which I assume you have not missed (Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of first publication of On The Origin of Species), the Elucian Islands in Second Life will play host to its very first interactive game, Notes from the Voyage, tomorrow (Wednesday 25 February 2009).
Joanna Scott tells us: "To complete the series of tasks in Notes from the Voyage, you will need to brave earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, swim among coral reef and uncover buried fossils, as well as encounter wildlife including jaguars, sloths and tortoises. Armed with your toolbag, compass and notebook, can you relive the highlights of Darwin’s famous Beagle voyage and rediscover his key scientific findings? Prizes await all those who succeed."
The new addition to the Elucian Islands archipelago, which includes a lush re-creation of South America and the Galapagos Islands, as well as a Second Life scale replica of HMS Beagle, will be opened on 25 February at 1800h GMT / 1000h PST and SLT (second life time), by Karen James, Darwin co-ordinator at the Natural History Museum, London and Science Director of The Beagle Project. Karen will talk to attendees about her work for the Darwin anniversaries. There will also be a showing of a short film from Nature Video of David Attenborough talking about his view on Darwin, natural selection and the Bible, before the game begins.
The Elucian Islands will also host a special series of talks on topics including the history of Darwin and Darwinism in research today, as well as themed podcasts and videos. All these events are free to attend and everybody is very welcome. To be kept up to date with all events, watch Joanna's blog or join the Nature group in Second Life.

Elucian Islands on nature.com: what it's about and how to get started.

Nature's Darwin special: all the magnificent content in the journal to celebrate Darwin, in one place.

More Nature videos.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 24, 2009
Categories: Education, Partners, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to an online News story at the Nature website (doi 10.1038/news.2009.99; 16 February), The Swedish Research Council is becoming involved in a row over academic freedom after a peer-reviewed journal removed a published paper — by two Swedish academics — from its website following a threat of legal action from the company whose technology the research criticized. The News story describes how the paper 'Charlatanry in forensic speech science: a problem to be taken seriously', was first published in the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law in December 2007. In it, the authors examine voice-analysis technologies, stating there is no scientific basis for one of them. Lawyers for the manufacturers complained and the paper was removed from the journal website (the abstract and an explanatory note from the editors remain). Several members of the Swedish Research Council have signed an expression of concern about the removal, which according to the journal was for reasons of possible defamation rather than for any problem with the accuracy of the scientific content.
We welcome your comments, here or at the Nature News website.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 23, 2009
Categories: Ethics, Publishing | 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.

Martin Fenner, founding president of the Good Paper Journal Club, notes that Vineet Sharma, who joined last week, is the 250th member. This Nature Network group started in March 2008 and had 100 members by May. Martin writes: "We had a number of interesting discussions with close to 50 messages and 36 recommended papers in the Connotea archive." All are welcome to join the group, to post examples of what you consider to be well-written papers, and to join the discussion about what makes a scientific description widely accessible and stimulating. Terminology, of course, is one serious hampering factor in this regard. In a group discussion of a paper on 'natural killer' cells, Linda Cooper is "struck, however, by the use of words such as “natural killer cells”. They sound scary and dangerous. Moreover, these cells have “self-renewing ‘memory’” (a very human concept) that is transferred into “naive” animals that respond with a “viral challenge”. (What is the opposite of “naive” I wonder, and would ‘response’ be more precise and less human-like than “challenge”?) While such terminology may make a story more exciting it could also have unintended consequences."

For those scientists who branch out as book authors, or who enjoy reading books about science written for a general readership, Angela Sani says that although she loves reading such books, many of them are dense, extremely long and can become boring. She asks Nature Network users to recommend some of their favourite gripping, narrative non-fiction science writing. There are plenty of well-known and not-so-well known suggestions and meta-suggestions, sufficient for about a year of reading at least, I would think.

Nature Network celebrated its second birthday on 14 February last week - a memorial that went relatively (but not entirely) un-noticed, possibly because of the Darwin frenzy and other less scientific but no doubt distracting celebrations (Abraham Lincoln's bicentennary and St Valentine's day). One person who noticed is Andrew Sun, who began his Nature Network blog in the early days of the platform, and here reflects on the past two years writing it. Before joining Nature Network, his main blogging activity was writing about scientific papers. Once he found himself with a ready-made audience of scientists, however, he decided to write with the perspective of being in China, and whether events he observed and experienced there were mirrored in other users' (not from China) experience. Soon he found his answer, and returned to writing about scientific papers, but notes that such posts do not attract many comments.

As well as founding and running the Good Paper Journal Club, Martin Fenner also blogs at Nature Network about scientific publishing in the digital age. I strongly recommend his blog to all scientists, as many new tools are discussed and their developers interviewed. One such interview featured last week: Geoffrey Bilder of Crossref , an organization best known for managing dois, or digital object identifiers, by which journal articles are uniquely recognized online. On this occasion, however, the conversation is about author identity. Would it be possible for scientists themselves each to have a identifier so they can be unequivocally associated with their papers? (This is an important question, for example, for Asian scientists who share a relatively small pool of surnames, or when one considers the amount of duplications and name/address errors in abstracting and indexing databases of papers.) The question of author identifiers is by no means simple, and the interview with Geoffrey Bilder provides an informative outline of some key aspects, complete with links to further information and discussion.

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.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 20, 2009
Categories: Nature Network round-up | Permalink | Comments (0)

This Correspondence by Stevan Harnad of the universities of Montreal, Canada and Southampton, UK, was published in Nature last week (Nature 457, 785; 2009):

Your Editorial 'Experts still needed' (Nature 457, 7–8; 2009, free to access online) is correct in that no metric alone can substitute for expert evaluation, because no single metric (including citation counts) is correlated strongly enough with expert judgements for it to take their place. But some individual metrics, such as citation counts, are nevertheless significantly correlated with expert judgements. It is likely that a battery of multiple metrics, when considered jointly, will be even more strongly correlated.
The UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) provides such an opportunity, alongside the wealth of potential performance indicators that are increasingly available online. Both enable a candidate battery of metrics — such as citations, co-citations, downloads, tags and growth/decay metrics — to be systematically validated against expert judgements, field by field. The 2008 RAE has also provided data that make it possible to do this validation exercise now, across all disciplines, on an important nationwide scale.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 19, 2009
Categories: Quality measures | Permalink | Comments (0)

As research into the public perception of nanotechnology becomes more complex and rigorous, it is increasingly clear that greater public awareness of nanotechnology will not, on its own, automatically lead to widespread public acceptance. So starts the Editorial in the current (February) issue of Nature Nanotechnology (4, 71; 2009). The Editorial is part of a special focus of the journal on public perceptions of nanotechnology, consisting in addition to the Editorial of three Letters (reports of original research), a News and Views article and a Thesis article, as well as a library of related articles from the journal's archive. In his Thesis article, Chris Toumey of the University of South Carolina NanoCenter describes new research by social scientists that is presenting a clearer picture of the factors that influence the public perception of nanotechnology and the challenges for those working to increase public acceptance of nanoscience and technology. "Together these studies alert us that reactions to nanotechnology will be shaped by a landscape of values, beliefs, concerns and other strong sentiments that were established in peoples' hearts long before most people heard or cared about nanometres, van der Waal's forces or carbon nanotubes."
Advice to the nanotechnology community provided by authors of the articles collected in this focus includes developing social psychology tools to frame information on controversial policy issues so that people of diverse values can derive the same factual information from it; and an awarness among social nanoscientists of the importance of translating their technical research findings into language that is directly useful to others.

Nature Nanotechnology focus on public perceptions of nanotechnology.

Guide to authors of Nature Nanotechnology.

Nature Nanotechnology: Asia-Pacific and beyond forum on Nature Network.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 18, 2009
Categories: Communication, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is an interesting Editorial in the March issue of Nature Reviews Microbiology (7, 174; 2009; subscription or site licence required) about the development of the field in the past 300-or so years since the time of van Leeuwenhoek. From the Editorial:

Advances in microbiology are largely driven by improvements in technology. The awe-inspiring size of the experiments performed today — such as studies of entire microbial communities — is the result of a centuries-long path of discovery, one advance built on the next. Current technologies have provided us with new insight into entire communities and biomes, and promise to unravel many secrets of the microbial world.....In 300 years, we have gone from observing mixed species in a drop of pond water to isolating and studying individual bacteria to sequencing all species in a sample of seawater. In the process, we have still only discovered perhaps 1% of all bacteria, and possibly an even lower percentage of phages and viruses. Microbiology has come a long way, and has a longer way to go. It will be fun.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 17, 2009
Categories: Disciplines | Permalink | Comments (0)

SciBX (Science-Business Exchange) is a year old, and executive editor Gaspar Taroncher-Oldenburg describes the publication's progress in an editorial in the current (February) issue (SciBX 2, doi:10.1038/scibx.2009.167). SciBX is mapping the translational space in depth, based on the collaboration between Nature Publishing Group and BioCentury to identify science with commercial potential and to describe the work required to complete the transition from bench to bedside. Gaspar writes:

"In its first-year assessment of the scientific space, the SciBX team evaluated more than 16,000 peer-reviewed journal articles published in over 40 top life science journals and selected over 2,000 papers for further editorial review of their scientific and commercial merit. This effort resulted in the publication of more than 850 Distillery briefings distributed across 19 disease classes." The largest segment of peer-reviewed science with commercial potential is being produced in the 'cancer space', even though most disease-related deaths worldwide are from cardiovascular disease. Statistics are provided on the proportion of peer-reviewed papers covered; the money raised by private and public biotechnology organizations; NIH funding by discipline, 2008; and WHO disease burden from 2004, projected to 2030. The article further explores how research efforts focused on cancer do not reflect the public health burden created by other diseases.

About SciBX.

Current issue.

Subscribe to SciBX.

About BioCentury, SciBX's partner.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 16, 2009
Categories: Partners, Publications | 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.

How optimally to scan the new literature for pertinent information is discussed at Katherine Haxton's Nature Network blog - whether scanning the contents listings from journal emails, or automatic RSS keyword searches. There are perspectives and suggestions in the discussion following the post.

It's all a mystery, writes Linda Lin at her Nature Network blog, how reading the literature to answer a question raises "several more questions all leading in different directions". What follows is a refreshing contrast to "scientifically proven" approaches to the communication of scientific research to the general public, as Frank Norman points out in a comment to Linda's post.

Deanne Taylor makes a welcome return to Nature Network with news of her leap into "an exotic metaworld of informatics". What is the best word for it? Medbioinformatics? Help to resolve the question at Deanne's Nature Network blog.

The effect of impact factors on our reading and writing about science is a question raised by William Burns in the Good Paper Journal Club forum in the light of the decision by the European Science Foundation to develop impact-factor measurements of the quality of journals covering the history and philosophy of science. Many of the arguments for and (mainly) against impact-factor metrics have been discussed and archived at the Citation in Science forum, and a pertinent question is how many of these will translate into journals in these other fields. Martin Fenner adds a further question: "Does the (over)use of impact factors change the readability of papers? Do authors cut a research project into smaller pieces that may increase your science metrics but make the project more difficult to understand? In what other ways could the reliance on impact factors change the readability for the worse (or the better)?"

Reported elsewhere on nature.com blogs and even in the journal Nature itself, but I think not logged by this column, Shirley Wu and Russ Altman have won the science blogging challenge issued at the Science Blogging conference in London last August. Congratulations to both winners: read all about it in this post by Nature Network's Editor, Corie Lok.

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 February 13, 2009
Categories: Nature Network round-up | Permalink | Comments (0)

Splicing describes the removal of introns from pre-messenger RNAs to form messenger RNAs, and is carried out by a large complex, the spliceosome. This processing can have a profound effect on the regulation and number of gene products encoded by the genome. In addition, mutations in key components of the splicing machinery, as well as dysfunction of alternative splicing regulators, have been associated with disease, a new Nature Structural and Molecular Biology (NSMB) Web Focus on splicing, free to access online, compiles recent papers that have elucidated the organization, structure and regulation of spliceosomal components, thus shedding light on the mechanistic heart of splicing. An accompanying NPG library highlights recent insights into splicing and the regulation and impact of alternative splicing.
As part of the NSMB Focus, the journal presents a podcast, Splice Talk, consisting of interviews with Reinhard Lührmann, Andrew MacMillan and Christine Guthrie about their recent research and about the general topic of splicing.

NSMB Web Focus on Splicing.
NSMB Focus and Supplements index.
NSMB journal home page.
NSMB Guide to Authors.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 12, 2009
Categories: Author services | Permalink | Comments (0)

I always enjoy Frank Gannon's editorials in EMBO Reports, so it is a pleasure to see the latest issue's table of contents alert in my inbox. This month (EMBO R. 10, 103; 2009), Dr Gannon discusses 'convergence', the latest business buzzword, but hardly a new concept to scientists, he writes.
"Research is, and should always be, ahead of its time, and convergence research is no exception. The potential of convergence in the development of new products and in public outreach is enormous and will provide valuable, diverse career options for those scientists and engineers who are ready to expand their skills and knowledge into new domains. The old days of a single skill career are now behind us and we have to prepare for this new and complex environment."
Enoy the rest of the article at EMBO Reports.

This Editorial introduces the EMBO Reports Science & Society Series on Convergence Research, which features viewpoints from authors who attended the 'Doing Society and Genomics—Convergence and Competence Building' workshop organized by Peter Stegmaier for the Centre for Society and Genomics at Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands) in September 2008. The journal editors hope that this series will help to introduce readers to the new multi- and transdisciplinary developments among the life sciences, social sciences and the humanities. The first article, 'Genomics in school', by Roald Verhoeff, Dirk Jan Boerwinkel and Arend Jan Waarlo, is free to access online. (EMBO R. 10, 120-124; 2009.)

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 11, 2009
Categories: Careers, Communication, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the Editorials in last week's issue of Nature (457, 636; 2009, free to access online) calls for vigorous pursuit and prosecution of "activists" who break the law, often violently, in their personal stances against the use of animals in experimental research. According to the Editorial, "US federal, state and university authorities need to go beyond enforcement and take an unequivocal, public stand that emphasizes the importance of animal research for drug testing and basic science — as did former UK prime minister Tony Blair. It would be especially helpful if President Barack Obama were to make such a statement."
Scientists should ensure that they are complying with the appropriate regulations, "and run their labs as if members of the public could walk in at any time to take a look. If they are seen to be committed to high-quality animal care, it can only improve their credibility among the public."
The Editorial also calls for a streamlining of the US regulatory network, calling on the US federal government to "conduct a thorough review of the regulations concerning animal research to eliminate gaps, ensure compliance and strengthen penalties. Ideally, the oversight powers would be consolidated within a single organization. But, in any case, such measures might boost public confidence in animal research.
Over the long term, this multipronged approach should not only protect the safety of researchers, but should open up space for a constructive dialogue about issues in animal research — especially the pursuit of reduction, replacement and refinement of such experiments — that concern both public and researchers alike."

See also a recent Nature Correspondence exchange between Roberto Caminiti (Nature 457, 147; 2009) and Bill Crum (Nature 457, 657; 2009). This exchange of views arose from a previous Nature Editorial (Nature 456, 281-282; 2008) about neuroscience research on non-human primates, calling scientists who work in this field to action over a proposed EU directive.

The Nature journals' polices on publication of work describing experiments performed on animals and other living organisms.

Archive of articles and debate on this blog about research involving human and other animal experiments.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 10, 2009
Categories: Animal experiments | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a summmary of posts from nature.com staff blogs over the past month or so that might be of interest to scientists as authors, communicators and peer reviewers:

Peer to Peer reports Journal of Biology's new type of peer-review system, with highlights of various different systems.

The Sceptical Chymist features Nature Chemical Biology's announcement of the journal's new Primer section.

Climate Feedback points readers to an interview with Andrew Gouldson, head of a new UK climate change policy and economics centre.

Nascent posts about Scitable, the new interactive online site for genetics students from Nature Education.

Peer to Peer has an outburst about trial by media or internet of published scientific research.

The Niche amusingly reports on wrong claims for cosmetics made in the name of science.

The Great Beyond adds a "Gallileo DNA twist" to the story about Tycho Brahe's exhumation that you may have read about in the general media.

See here for an index and tracking website for all scientific blogs including, but not limited to, Nature Publishing Group staff blogs.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 09, 2009
Categories: nature.com blogs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Make personal history and come to the first Digital Lives Research Conference. The Digital Lives Research Project is hosting a conference starting on Monday 9 February 2009, and continuing until Wednesday 11 February, at the British Library in London. The aim is to explore a wide range of aspects of digital lives and the curation of personal digital archives in a collaborative conference bringing together researchers, professionals, creators and the digital public.
On 11 February, virtual delegates can join the conference on the Elucian Islands, the Second Life home of Nature Publishing Group and Macmillan Publishers. The programme for the day focuses on the web, and is oriented towards life online and online lives. Topics range from virtual worlds and iScience to cloud computing. Speakers include Dame Wendy Hall DBE and Nature Publishing Group's Timo Hannay. The day finishes with polar explorer Ben Saunders talking about 'Digital Life at the Extremes'. Other highlights include a talk by Georgina Ferry, author of some superb scientific biographies including those of Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz; and a “writers in conversation” session to include Dame Antonia Byatt and Rt Hon Anthony Wedgwood Benn. I (Maxine Clarke) shall also be attending.
The conference is free to attend on 9 and 11 February, registration required. There is a small registration fee for 10 February, but waivers are available.
About the conference.
Programme and speakers.
Registration details.
Digital lives project team blog.
Information and user guidance about the Second Life version of the Digital Lives conference.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 07, 2009
Categories: Conferences, Partners, Public and media | 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.

A detailed dissection of the new J. Biol. (a journal published by BioMed Central) policy of allowing authors to publish papers after one round of review without making the changes requested by the reviewers is provided by Noah Gray, himself an editor at Nature. After summarizing the arguments for and against this system, Noah comes down against it - as, in the main, do those who comment on the post.

"Who will be science's Oprah?", asks Craig Rowell. Al Gore, Anderson Cooper, Alan Alda and Julie Roberts are considered but found wanting. Where are the spokesmen and women for science in the Obama era, to add some charisma and glamour? Not many nominations as yet - David Suzuki being one of the few. Do you have any good suggestions? If not, you can always join Jennifer Rohn and find out how to apply to be a scientific film star.

In the meantime, Brian Derby checks out his progress in another kind of 'science pop' chart - providing a commentary on which papers are climbing and which falling in the Web of Science citation index - as well as experiencing some bemusement as to why. Yet another indicator of the impossibility of 'quality metrics'?

"Why is science important?", ponders Henry Gee. For him, not because it is useful, or for what it has allowed us to discover, but because of how it frames what we have not found out yet. An amusing Hilbert's list follows.

Martin Fenner, on the other hand, has been busy interviewing Kevin Emamy of Cite-U-Like, a social bookmarking service for scientists.

If you blog about peer-reviewed research on Nature Network, you can now submit your posts to researchblogging. org, a website that aggregates blog posts about peer-reviewed research. Bloggers simply need to register their blog with the site and then submit individual posts. Full details from Corie Lok, Nature Network's Editor.

And in further Nature Network news, there is now a ‘hub’ dedicated to New York City, offering a dedicated blog, forum, jobs and event listings for the city’s thriving scientific community. “We decided to launch a hub in New York because, of all the local communities using Nature Network, the NYC one has been the largest and most active,” says Corie Lok. “For the past nine months, New York scientists have been meeting monthly in pubs to socialize and network, and it's all been organized and advertised through Nature Network.” Two Columbia University-based scientists are helping to bring the community together: Caryn Shechtman, a fourth-year graduate student, and Barry Hudson, an associate research scientist, blog about scientific life in the city, by covering scientific events, writing about local research, and profiling local researchers.

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 February 06, 2009
Categories: Nature Network round-up | Permalink | Comments (0)

The first Nature Darwin debate has the title: Are We Still Evolving?, and will take place on Monday 9 February 2009 at Kings Place, London at 7 p.m. local time. Speakers are Henry Gee, palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist and senior editor, Nature; Susan Blackmore, psychologist, writer and visiting lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol; and Andrew Pomiankowski, Professor of Genetics, University College London. Chair of the panel is Oliver Morton, chief News and Features editor at Nature. The panellists will be addressing the question of whether natural selection is still shaping humans, given that our survival is often more dependent on technology than genes. What might our species look like 1000 years from now?
Further details, including venue information and more about the speakers, can be found at the Nature Network London events forum.

Discuss this event and the general topic at the Nature Network London forum.

See also further discussion at the Nature Network Opinion forum, to which you are welcome to contribute.

Nature's special celebration of Darwin's 200th birthday - a wonderful collection of articles and interactive content of all types, updated as the year continues.

Fifteen evolutionary gems: free access to 15 Nature publications that illustrate the breadth, depth and power of evolutionary thinking.

The second Nature Darwin debate: What Price Biodiversity?, will take place on 9 March 2009. More details are available here.

Kings Place "Words on Monday" debates.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 05, 2009
Categories: Communication, Conferences, Partners, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

Can visual arts stimulate creativity in the science laboratory? A new biochemistry building for the University of Oxford might provide the answer, writes Georgina Ferry (Nature 457, 541; 2009). From the article:

"The prime purpose of the art project is to create a stunning physical environment for research. "The senior people [in the university] grasped that if you are trying to recruit the best people in the world, walking them through a building that is dark and dingy is not the best way to get them," says Sansom. Time will tell if money spent on art gives a significant return in scientific discovery."

A 360-degree interactive view of the building can be found here.

See also Martin Kemp's article Laudable Labs? (Nature 395, 849; 1998). "You can read much about the history of science and of architecture in the changing styles and materials used in the building of laboratories. It's a story of fashion, functionality and financial constraints.....We are all too familiar with the messy clutter of disparate laboratory buildings squeezed into congested university campuses. The lab is a major building type, yet we have come to expect little of it — other than as providing functional spaces which almost invariably prove to be inadequate as soon as they are occupied. It would be better if we cared more about the buildings' effects on our visual ambience."

More on creativity at Nautilus.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 04, 2009
Categories: Careers, Communication, Public and media, Support | Permalink | Comments (0)

How to evaluate a nation's scientific integrity is the question tackled in one of the Editorials in the current issue of Nature (457, 512; 29 January 2009, free to access online). From the Editorial: "Like many emerging countries, Saudi Arabia measures itself by indices, and has developed its own index for 'responsible competitiveness', based on a number of metrics. But fostering strong science-based innovation requires its own metrics of inputs and achievement. So here, for any country concerned about the reputation and integrity of its research base, are some metrics that might be developed into an index for responsible scientific competitiveness."
Four main sets of metric are identified: (1) misconduct such as fraud, fabrication and plagiarism; (2) transparency and objectivity of a nation's systems of evaluation, funding, staff appointments and promotion; (3) a nation's framework for science policy, and the extent to which it allows talented scientists to follow their noses in the pursuit of what makes the world tick while also giving societal values and economic needs their due priority; and (4) the elusive concept of 'openness' — a key corollary of trust.
The Editorial concludes that, "taken together, these qualitative metrics would amount to an index of responsible science for any country, whatever its stage of scientific development. They could be measured by the documentation of structures and practices and by independent surveys of scientists."

Previous Nautilus posts on quality measures (mostly focusing on individuals' scientific research output, rather than on a country's 'scientific integrity'.)

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 03, 2009
Categories: Quality measures | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Investigating the compliance of our publications with MIAME standards (minimum information about a microarray experiment; Editorial, Nat. Genet. 38, 1089; 2006), we found that even when authors and referees are aware of community standards and even with editors mandating both data deposition and accession linking as a condition of publication, a proportion of microarray datasets were at that time unavailable or incomplete." So starts the Editorial in this month's (February issue) Nature Genetics (41, 135; 2009).
In an Analysis article in the same issue of the journal (Nat. Genet. 41, 149-155; 2009), John P. A. Ioannidis and collaborators (four teams) treated the findings of a number of microarray papers published in Nature Genetics between 2005 and 2006 as their gold standard, and attempted to replicate a sample of the analyses conducted on each of them, with frankly dismal results.
According to the Editorial, "the findings of this Analysis should be used to improve practice rather than to critize the authors and referees of these publications. A certain amount of both skepticism and initiative must of course be assumed on behalf of all readers and users of research publications. Equally, there must be enough goodwill and professionalism in the research community to permit critical reanalysis of research findings at any and every moment without this core scientific practice implying any personal criticism. Any scientist should be prepared to reexamine published work, one's own and one's colleagues' alike. In doing so it always helps to make clear one's needs and assumptions, and the Analysis in this issue does indeed explain the limits of the analysts' requirements and critical aims."
The journal, and other Nature journals that publish papers describing microarrays, now insist that authors deposit their data to GEO or ArrayExpress before the submitted paper is sent for peer-review.

Nature journals' policies on data and materials availability, including microarray deposition.
MGED website, specifying MIAME standards necessary to interpret and reproduce microarray data.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 02, 2009
Categories: Data availability | Permalink | Comments (0)