Nautilus

Joerg Heber, a senior editor at Nature Materials, announces that access to all Editorials in the journal is now free to registered users of nature.com. This follows a similar decision taken at Nature some years ago, and more recently, by Nature Cell Biology. The August Editorial of Nature Materials (8, 611; 2009) discusses publishing models more broadly: "As moves towards open-access schemes gain momentum, the choice between 'author pays' and subscription-based models may come down to fundamental business considerations rather than limits in access to original research." In 'open access' publishing, authors pay for publication costs, and online access and dissemination of those papers is free for readers. The Editorial goes on to describe the publication model of the Nature journals, which is (in the main) subscription-based (in which the reader or institution pays for access), and which also offer various open-access services to authors, who retain copyright of their articles...."at every stage of manuscript handling we provide an expensive, high-quality service. This not only involves the professional subediting and production of accepted papers, but also an exhaustive prescreening of submitted manuscripts. At Nature Materials, we prescreen well above 80% of submitted manuscripts without peer review. This means that, at a cost, we rely much less on the 'free' peer-reviewing services of scientists than journals with lower screening rates. As open access certainly should not be considered as a way to lower publication standards, the overall expenses related to the dissemination of scientific results should be considered so that the costs remain the same. This means that research-intensive institutions in particular (or those paying for their research grants) may well end up paying proportionally more under author-pays models than they would under subscription-based models. Researchers from less research-intensive institutions on the other hand would benefit."
Read the full version of the Nature Materials editorial here.
Comments on the Editorial are welcome at the Nature Publishing Group news forum at Nature Network.

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

The Nature Awards for Mentoring in Science are annual prizes that have been awarded by Nature since 2005 in recognition of excellence in the nurturing of young scientists.
The 2009 awards will be held in Japan, the first time that they have honoured mentors from an Asian nation. Nominations are invited for outstanding mentors from any scientific discipline based in Japan, in two categories: mid-career (up to 59 years of age) and lifetime achievement (60 years of age and over).
Nominations can come from current or former students or colleagues of the nominee from anywhere in the world, and must be supported by two additional people mentored at different times during the nominee's career. The awards, worth ¥1.5 million (US$16,000) each, will be presented in December 2009 at a ceremony at the UK ambassador's residence in Tokyo.
Nominations opened on 22 July, and will close on 25 September 2009. Applications may be made in either Japanese or English. Further details and nomination forms are available for download in English and in Japanese.

More about Nature awards.
More about Nature's mentoring scheme.
Nature' s journal home page.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 28, 2009
Categories: Awards, Careers, Support | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Source Event, now in its third successful year, is a dedicated science career fair that combines a dynamic exhibition with conference and workshop sessions. The event will promote the United Kingdom and Europe as a great place to pursue a career in science, be it in industrial research, research organizations or academia. It will present the best opportunities from the best organizations: public, private, national and international.
Jobseekers will be able to meet potential employers who are offering hundreds of vacancies. Plenary and workshop sessions will provide a unique opportunity to meet well-known scientists and gain careers information and advice.
The Source Event careers fairs are in London on 25 September and in Berlin on 4 December 2009.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 27, 2009
Categories: Careers | 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 and communicators. Readers are welcome to join any of these discussions by visiting the links provided. The Nature Network week column is archived here.

Anna Kushnir continues to find out about contracts for government-funded research. "Writing a proposal is no different than writing a grant, it turns out. You tell the funding body (in this case, the FDA) how you are going to approach the problem, lay out the experimental detail and list alternatives, should obstacles be met. You then describe how you will process the data once it’s acquired and what it will mean, in the grand scheme of things."

To coincide with the Science Online conference, Matt Brown is organizing a couple of events similar to those of last year. One is a pub crawl on Thursday 20 August around four central London pubs, each with a scientific connection. The second is a guided tour of some of London's scientific museums and attractions on Friday 21 August. Matt writes: "I’ve still to plan out the route, but the tour will probably take in such venues as the Wellcome Collection, Royal College of Surgeons Museum and the South Kensington Museums. I’ll also point out sites of historic scientific interest as we go round. The tour will be free (including entry into all venues) and you can join at any point. All you’ll need is a Zone 1 travelcard or Oyster ticket." More details are in the Science Online London forum. Register interest in either event by sending Matt an email . In the meantime, if you're in London, you can take a look at some science-art: "carbon rapture", as reported by Chloe Sharrocks.

If you already blog or are interested in giving it a try, and live in New York, Nature Network is looking for contributors to its New York hub. More details here, from Caryn Shechtman.

The journal Cell has announced a project called "article of the future" and has displayed two article prototypes on its website for reader comments. In the Good Paper Journal Club, Martin Fenner asks whether new article formats that move away from the traditional print format are better suited to communicate the message of the paper. Examples include the use of audio and video, and different versions (basic and extended) of the materials and methods section. Futher discussion on the broader role of the "paper" is in the forum Scientific Findings in a Digital Age: What is the Genuine Article? , based on issues addressed by John Willbanks at the British Library earlier this week, as part of the Talk Science series.

This weekly column will be taking a break. Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Planet Nature
Nature.com's science blogs index and tracker
Nature Publishing Group news at Nature Network

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 24, 2009
Categories: Nature Network round-up | Permalink | Comments (0)

Venture funding is declining quickly and is unlikely to bounce back. But less money means lower expectations — good news for smaller science start-ups, says John Browning in an Essay in today's issue of Nature (460, 459; 2009 - free to access online for one week from publication date). From the Essay:

Given the lacklustre returns of traditional investment strategies, venture capitalists are also looking to do more with less. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape Communications and a pillar of the Silicon Valley establishment, recently co-launched a venture firm that plans to invest as little as $50,000 per start-up — far less than the $3 million considered to be a minimum by many venture capitalists. Although it is early days, efforts such as this might reshape venture capitalism. Without the weight of Googlesque expectations on their shoulders, companies that might have joined the ranks of the living dead could start to look lively. A start-up focused on a non-blockbuster drug or diagnostic test might now find itself with an attractive niche market, garnering the attention of venture capitalists who would usually have avoided this type of limited-growth company.
Smaller investments will force entrepreneurs to work harder — no more plush offices or fridges stocked with designer fruit juice. But, because the returns demanded by investors are proportional to the amounts put in, smaller investments also reduce the pressure on companies and allow them to become more flexible in their business strategies. And that is what entrepreneurship needs most.

The full article is here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 23, 2009
Categories: Careers, NPG special content, Support | Permalink | Comments (1)

Reporting of scientific research is sometimes exaggerated or at worse inaccurate. Researchers need to change this and have the power to do so. So states the August Editorial in Nature Immunology (10, 795; 2009). Although attention-grabbing headlines might increase subscriptions or traffic to newspaper websites, such reporting is irresponsible to the public and to science in general. Even if the article itself is more balanced, many readers never get much beyond the headlines, which include: "Man flu is not a myth; "Burger fellas firing blanks"; red wine is a "cancer-busting antioxidant"; and a 47-million-year-old fossil of a lemur-like animal is a "missing link" in human evolution. Although the Editorial gives some pessimisitic examples of science journalism, it also reports some better news of initiatives to which scientists can contribute. "Several websites that critique the scientific press have started to evolve. In the UK, the National Health Service provides an unbiased and evidence-based analysis of health stories that hit the media. HealthNewsReview.org is a website dedicated to improving the accuracy of news stories about medical treatments, tests, products and procedures. The Yale Environment 360 website provides unbiased opinions from scientists and journalists on issues such as climate change. These are just a handful of examples." In addition, organizations such as the Voice of Young Science network are providing advice for researchers on how to stand up for science in public and correct misinformation in the mass media.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 22, 2009
Categories: Communication, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is the text of a Correspondence by Richard Behringer of the University of Texas, published in the current issue of Nature (460, 324; 16 July 2009).
I was disappointed by the view expressed in your Editorial 'The sharing principle' (Nature 459, 752; 2009 - free to read online) that the mouse community does not share its strains. This is untrue. Most labs are very collegial, spending a considerable amount of time and effort on distributing their mouse strains. Although there are a few labs that withhold distribution, any community may contain such individuals. The fact that a mouse strain is not found in a repository does not mean that it is not being shared.
I was also puzzled by the conclusion of May's CASIMIR workshop, noted in the Editorial, that "the sharing problem urgently needs resolution" with regard to international mouse gene-knockout projects. Such mutant alleles will mostly be archived as embryonic stem-cell lines. Readers should also realize that repositories cannot keep all their mouse strains live 'on the shelf': most strains are frozen. The cost for a user to have a strain thawed is thousands of dollars and it takes many months before the recovered mice become available. This is a big disadvantage for labs on tight budgets. With regard to funding agencies: in grant proposals to the US National Institutes of Health, for example, applicants are required to write a 'resource-sharing plan' that includes genetically modified mice.
It was suggested that sharing avoids duplication of effort. But it is essential that more than one group generates mutations in the same gene as a crosscheck. No two labs generate the same allele, and every geneticist knows that the expression of different alleles can lead to very distinct phenotypes.
Your claim that sharing mice "has never been easier" is questionable, considering all the paperwork, health certificates, veterinary screens, special serology screens, costs, time and logistics involved. This is quite different from uploading DNA sequences in the comfort of your office.
It would be great if funding agencies supplemented grants involving the generation of mouse strains to cover the costs of sending the strains to a repository. In these tough financial times, that seems unlikely.

Department of Genetics, University of Texas, M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, 1515 Holcombe Boulevard, Houston, Texas 77030, USA.

Nature journals' policy on data and materials availability.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 21, 2009
Categories: Data availability | Permalink | Comments (0)

A universal tagging system that links data sets with the author(s) that generated them is essential to promote data sharing within the proteomics and other research communities. The July Editorial in Nature Biotechology (27, 579; 2009) reports the results of the journal's survey of author compliance in depositing proteomics and molecular-interaction data underlying the papers they published. The editors found that even authors who are proponents of data deposition are not making data available in all of the papers they publish. Inhibitory factors include data quality and the user-unfriendliness of some databases. The Editorial concludes:
"One option would be to provide researchers who release data to public repositories with a means of accreditation. This would take the form of a universally standardized tag for data that could be searched and recognized by both funding agencies and employers. An ability to search the literature for all online papers that used a particular data set would enable appropriate attribution for those who share. In essence, the tag would be a digital object identifier (DOI), currently best known for its use in unambiguously identifying papers online.
Similar to citation information about publications, citation information about a researcher's data DOIs could be gathered by funders assessing future support and used by institutions in performance evaluation. Researchers who disclose data sets that subsequently prove particularly useful to the community would end up with highly cited data DOIs, and could thereby be rewarded accordingly.
Such a system would not solve all the problems slowing data disclosure in proteomics and elsewhere. But it would provide greater incentive than the present system of evaluation, which is skewed almost exclusively to publications in high-profile journals and citation metrics. Data DOIs would not only enhance a researcher's reputation but also establish priority of data generation. Most important of all, they would provide a way to acknowledge the time and effort individuals must invest in sharing data, which ultimately benefits the scientific community as a whole."

See also a Correspondence in the same issue of Nature Biotechnology (27, 597-598; 2009): PRIDE Converter: making proteomics data-sharing easy, by Harald Barsnes, Juan Antonio Vizcaíno, Ingvar Eidhammer and Lennart Martens, a collaboration between the University of Bergen and the European Bioinformatics Institute.

Nature journal policies on data and materials availability.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 20, 2009
Categories: Data availability | Permalink | Comments (1)

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 and communicators. Readers are welcome to join any of these discussions by visiting the links provided. The Nature Network week column is archived here.

Teisha Rowland provides her perspective on the oft-discussed topic of why scientists blog in the science blogging forum. She writes: "many of the stem cell blogs I’ve seen focus (often entirely) on stem cell news and politics, while not going into the biology enough to quench my curiosity. This originally inspired me to create my blog; I wanted to explore the topics less visited by most stem cell blogs (i.e. history and the biological details) and in this way educate myself more as well as make this information more accessible to a wide audience." Another perspective on science blogging is provided in this stimulating post by Anna Kushnir.

Metrics are in the frame again, as Bart Penders argues in the citation in science forum that despite their many flaws, scientists have to take them seriously. Other views follow.

Massimo Pinto comments on Italy's decision to "outsource" its grant peer-review process. It's bordering on humiliation, he writes, but necessary. Roberto Cerbino adds that it is "he first step toward a more intelligent organization of peer review procedures in Italy." Join their discussion at the Nature Network Italy forum. A different aspect of peer-review is hotly debated as a result of a post by Martin Fenner, who muses on whether companies and organisations would pay journals for "peer-review information". Whatever one may think of that idea, peer reviewers' reports should be kept confidential, writes Roger Macy in the Nature Opinion forum discussion arising from a recent Nature Essay in which Toby Murcott argued for journalists' access to peer-reviewers' deliberations.

Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Planet Nature
Nature.com's science blogs index and tracker
Nature Publishing Group news at Nature Network

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 17, 2009
Categories: Nature Network round-up | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Horizons articles present experts' visions of the foreseeable future of a research theme. The articles are commissioned by Nature's editors, and usually published without peer review, given the journal's intention of capturing a respected individual perspective. The articles are intended to anticipate the future, but also to influence it. On publication of the first set of Horizons, Philip Campbell, Editor of Nature, wrote: "I hope that these visions will inspire and maybe even encourage some to adjust their research ambitions as a result. Inspired by them ourselves, we'll be publishing more Horizons in the future." In its 9 July 2009 issue, Nature published the following four articles, all of which can be accessed online via the Horizons archive page.
The possibility of impossible cultures
Marc D. Hauser
Insights from evolutionary developmental biology and the mind sciences could change our understanding of the human capacity to think and the ways in which the human mind constrains cultural expressions.
Nature 460, 190–196 (9 July 2009).
Synthesis at the molecular frontier
Paul A. Wender & Benjamin L. Miller
Driven by remarkable advances in the understanding of structure and reaction mechanisms, organic synthesis will be increasingly directed to producing bioinspired and newly designed molecules.
Nature 460, 197–201 (9 July 2009).
Biomarkers in psychiatry
Ilina Singh & Nikolas Rose
The use of biomarkers to predict human behaviour and psychiatric disorders raises social and ethical issues, which must be resolved by collaborative efforts.
Nature 460, 202–207 (9 July 2009).
Toxicology for the twenty-first century
Thomas Hartung
The testing of substances for adverse effects on humans and the environment needs a radical overhaul if we are to meet the challenges of ensuring health and safety.
Nature 460, 208–212 (9 July 2009).
Previous Horizons articles, including articles by Thomas Kirkwood on ageing, Peter Murray-Rust on chemistry and Paul Nurse on life, logic and information, are archived here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 16, 2009
Categories: NPG special content | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Nature News (Nature 460, 163; 8 July 2009):
A former University of Tennessee professor has been sentenced to four years in prison for sharing sensitive technologies with his Chinese and Iranian graduate students.
J. Reece Roth, an emeritus professor of electrical engineering, was sentenced on 1 July by a Tennessee district court for violating the Arms Export Control Act. He had been developing ways to reduce the drag on unmanned planes, and employed two research assistants without obtaining the required licence (see Nature 442, 232–233; 2006). Roth plans to appeal the verdict.
In a separate case, a Chinese-born scientist who has lived in the United States for 23 years is suing the US government for rights violations for expelling him last year from the NASA Ames Research Center, California.
Haiping Su, a US citizen who received his doctorate in 1991 from Kansas State University in Manhattan, alleged in a case filed on 24 June in a San Jose federal court that a 2007 security badge-issuing process led to his illegal ousting.
Su was working on airborne systems for imaging forests. His attorneys say he had no involvement with classified material.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 15, 2009
Categories: Biosecurity, Data availability, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Medicine is the latest Nature journal to address the question of plagiarism. In its July Editorial (Nat. Med. 15, 707; 2009) the journal opines that scientific plagiarism—a problem as serious as fraud—has not received all the attention it deserves. The Editorial outlines a strategy that, it says, all-too-frequently works:

"You don't have the resources to do the experiments? Don't worry! A little creative writing might be all you need to sail through the financial crisis. Here's how: use a solid paper as your base; carry out a parallel set of experiments in your favorite model; tweak the data so that the numbers are not identical but remain realistic; and, when you're ready to write it all up, paraphrase the original paper ad libitum. Last, submit your new manuscript to a modest journal in the hopes that the authors of the paper you used as 'inspiration' won't notice your 'tribute' to their work—even though imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, their approval of your 'reworking' of their paper cannot be guaranteed. If all goes well, getting a couple of these manuscripts under your belt might make all the difference when you apply for that elusive grant."

The Editorial goes on to outline some common unethical practices in more detail, concluding that "journals have a vested interest in protecting their rights over what they publish. It is therefore not surprising that online tools, such as iThenticate, designed to spot similarities between an input text and the published literature, are becoming popular among publishers. But as with every other type of scientific misconduct, it is ultimately the community that needs to set appropriate standards and penalties to fight plagiarism."

Nature journals' policies on plagiarism and fabrication; on duplicate publication; and on image integrity and standards.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 14, 2009
Categories: Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Editorial in the July issue of Nature Methods is the journal's popular annual round up of summer reading (Nat. Meth. 6, 471; 2009). According to the Editorial, for those who look hard enough there are a few good fiction books to be found with refreshingly realistic biologists as central characters in laboratory settings. A mix of the old and the new follows, including brief accounts of Cantor's Dilemma by Carl Djerassi; Intuition by Allegra Goodman; Long for this World by Michael Byers; Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis; Experimental Heart by Jennifer Rohn; and Mendel's Dwarf by Simon Mawer.
At the journal's Methagora blog, Allison Doerr emphasizes one benefit of science-in-fiction: as a "medium for overturning stereotypes about scientists, and for getting more people interested in science and for educating them about what scientists do." Comments and suggestions of good science-in-fiction from readers are welcome at Methagora.

Nature Methods' previous science-in-fiction recommendations.
See also: From Bench to Book by Jennifer Rohn (Nature 451, 128; 2008).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 13, 2009
Categories: Education, Public and media, Writing | 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 and communicators. Readers are welcome to join any of these discussions by visiting the links provided. The Nature Network week column is archived here.

Martin Fenner this week provides a recipe for receiving journal tables of contents (TOCs) automatically. Among other tips, he explains how RSS feeds can be used to set up a web page with all the journal TOCs relevant to a group of co-workers, or share just the articles of interest using a social bookmarking site. And on the topic of web tools, Richard Grant shares the initial results of his poll about scientists' use of Twitter, a popular microblogging service.

If you wonder what a science consultant does to apply for a contract from the US government, look no further than Anna Kushnir's post about her new job. "The process of winning government contracts is not easy and it’s not fast, but the pay-off could be huge, especially for a small company such as the one I work for. Contracts can take as little as a few months (or even weeks) to years to complete, with compensation ranging from a few thousand dollars to millions", she writes.

"Adverjournalism" is decried by Craig Rowell, who cites a journalistic article about pharmaceutical research that mainly serves to advertise a company's programme. How common is this practice?, asks Craig - who also notes an associated issue - sensationalism - from some press reports earlier in the week.

Best-practice for journals in their formatting of online-only Supplementary Information is raised this week by Stephen Curry, and a feisty debate follows his post (in which I confess to being a protagonist). Feel free to weigh in on this important topic: to what extent is SI an integral part of a paper, or part of a wider universe of data and resources?

How can professional women scientists support younger women in their careers if they themselves do not yet have tenure? Deborah Yoder-Hines was surprised at the answer she received to this question when she asked it at a conference session. She goes on to ask members of the Women in Science forum to suggest additional ways to support women scientists in their early careers, even if they are not in an ideal position themselves.

I, Science magazine is one of the latest groups at Nature Network, created by Mico Tatalovic. I, Science is Imperial College’s award-winning popular science magazine, mainly run by the MSc Science Communication students.

Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Planet Nature
Nature.com's science blogs index and tracker
Nature Publishing Group news at Nature Network

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 10, 2009
Categories: Nature Network round-up | Permalink | Comments (0)

The US State Department promises to accelerate the visa process for foreign graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, a promise welcomed by Nature Structural & Molecular Biology in its July Editorial (16, 677; 2009). The Editorial decries the occasions when researchers have been severely delayed in trying to obtain or renew visas, leaving some stranded and others unable to travel to the United States for work or to attend scientific meetings.
The US State Department is now streamlining its procedures, aiming (eventually) to deal with routine requests within 2 weeks, an improvement on the current reported 4 months' average delay for applicants from China, for example. The Editorial concludes: "We must continue to attract and retain the best and the brightest from all over the world if we are going to retain America's global competitiveness, and reducing visa-processing delays is definitely a step in the right direction. If we don't, America's loss will be the rest of the world's gain."

Nature Structural & Molecular Biology journal home page.
Nature Structural & Molecular Biology guide to authors.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 09, 2009
Categories: Biosecurity, Careers, Communication, Conferences, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a summmary of some 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:

In the Field: Reports from the World Science Festival in New York.

The Great Beyond: Scientists strike back at pseudoscience.

Sceptical Chymist: Q/As with Aaron Wright and with Ian Fleming.

Methagora: Nature Methods top downloads for May.

The Great Beyond: New element needs a name.

Indigenus: Western concerns about climate don’t help vulnerable populations.

Sceptical Chymist: end of the cookbook laboratory.

Nascent: Welcome to the streamosphere. And here is a Streamosphere update (7 July).

Methagora: Cover error?

The Niche: Stem cell trial to go ahead in India.

In the Field: Following the Apollo 11 moon landing in real-time - 40 years on, and reporting on the World Conference of Science Journalists.

The Niche: Chief scientific officer leaves regenerative medicine intsitute.

Climate Feedback: Reporting the 2009 Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting.

Sceptical Chymist: Blogging and Twittering from the 2009 Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting.

Nascent: "I am not a scientist, I am a number".

Previous nature.com blogs round-ups.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 08, 2009
Categories: nature.com blogs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let's stop playing with numbers, suggests Cheng-Cai Zhang of Aix-Marseille Université and Laboratoire de Chimie Bactérienne-CNRS in the latest EMBO Reports (10, 664; 2009).

He writes: "It is becoming increasingly fashionable to play with numbers, or letters representing numbers (for example, h and w), to measure the performance of a scientist or a scientific journal. Developing algorithms to calculate such numbers is becoming a science in itself, with each author claiming that his or her metrics measure better than others...... let us go back to the basic question: is it possible to measure the contribution, even relative, of a scientist in any particular field without bias by relying on metrics? The answer is no...... the solution is the review process, conducted by peers in both the funding and publishing systems, which already has the most essential role in assessing scientific quality and thus advancing science. Who among us has ever relied solely, or even mainly on indexes or citations to help us make a decision when reviewing a project or a manuscript submitted to a journal? I would argue that none of us rely on this type of data at all. It is therefore time to stop these futile efforts in searching for a magic number—which does not exist, by the way—and instead to rely on and trust the judgement of our peers to measure the scientific achievements of a scientist or the relevance of a journal."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 07, 2009
Categories: Quality measures | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fraud in science is difficult to spot immediately, but, as high-profile cases show, it does get found out. Tackling plagiarism is at least becoming an easier fight, according to the July Editorial in Nature Physics (5, 449; 2009).

Scientific misconduct comes in many forms. Plagiarism, or "cut and paste" science, is one type, now being tackled by use of programs such as Déjà vu, which is based on the text-similarity software eTBLAST. From the Nature Physics Editorial: "When used on the Medline database, eTBLAST flagged up 74,790 pairs of papers similar in content or language. Following manual inspection, 2,125 have been labelled as duplicates, 1,697 as sanctioned, 1,498 as distinct, but the majority remain unverified. For two papers to be considered duplicates, they must share 85% of their text. Given the number of review articles and conference proceedings, the number of duplicates is not surprising — although it is surprising that most of the duplications by the same authors are usually published within five months of each other, which means that they were probably submitted to different journals at the roughly the same time — but 228 of the duplicates are from different authors, which suggests plagiarism. These cases are reported to the authors and journal editors."

For publishers, CrossCheck is available for checking submissions against 20 million publications, and is used by Nature Publishing Group. The Editorial concludes by hoping that this kind of publication policing will feed into improved scientific practice — because it is only a matter of time before fraudsters are caught.

Nature journals' policies on plagiarism and fabrication; on duplicate publication; and on image integrity and standards.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 06, 2009
Categories: Ethics | 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 and communicators. Readers are welcome to join any of these discussions by visiting the links provided. The Nature Network week column is archived here.

Ruth Wilson is going to Istanbul later this month to give a talk at the Equal Opportunities Conference. She'll speak about the steps she and her colleagues at the UK Resource Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology have taken to help women scientists connect online. To gather information for her talk, she asks Nature Network users for their views and experience of whether blogging, twittering, and other social media help women’s careers in science, engineering, technology. Is this male-dominated area any less so in online environments? Are there online facilities or developments that would help women wanting to start/develop their careers? Ruth welcomes your views at the Women in Science forum (views from men are as welcome as those from women).

Do we need a scientific literature? The answer might seem obvious, but Bob O'Hara gets to the basics of "why we consider peer-reviewed research so important". It's a very well-argued post, covering access to the literature itself and to what it says once you have access to it. Unusually for a blog post, a diverse range of commenters broadly agree with it, in a discussion of a range of "accessibility" issues. Please join in.

Cath Ennis gets to grips with the writing style itself. "It began with the phrase “The human genome is a motley harlequin”, and became even more eccentric as it progressed. It was wonderful stuff. I loved it. But I knew I couldn’t use it. A little part of me died as I took out my red pen and rewrote his words in a more conventional academic style." Read on at Cath's blog post 'Resistance is futile', which refers to Jennifer Rohn's stimulating post about "the untold narrative of the precise dryness of scientific papers".

The writing process will be further dissected at Second Life on Tuesday (7 July), where visitors can join Tom Levenson, professor of science writing at MIT, who will be talking about his new book, Newton and the Counterfeiters. Professor Levenson will be taking questions from the audience on the book, his career as a writer, or anything else. See Joanna Scott's blog for more details of the event itself and of how to set up an account on Second Life.

Dara Sosulski picks up a bit of pseudoscientific news education, in a week when the sixth World Conference of Science Journalists has been putting science news reporting in the spotlight. There's a discussion in the Nature Opinion forum about Nature' s special issue to accompany the conference - a collection of articles ranging from the evolution of the science journalist from cheerleader to watchdog, to how blogging by audiences at scientific conferences is challenging traditional newspaper reporting. Another aspect of science journalism - scaremongering - was at the heart of the most recent Boston "Skeptics in the pub" meeting, explosively described by Robert Pinsonneault.

Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Planet Nature
Nature.com's science blogs index and tracker
Nature Publishing Group news at Nature Network

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 03, 2009
Categories: Nature Network round-up | Permalink | Comments (0)

This month's (July) Nature Chemical Biology includes two articles describing how access to the highest quality chemical probes will ensure their prominent position in the biological and drug discovery toolboxes.
Aled M Edwards, Chas Bountra, David J Kerr and Timothy M Willson, in their Commentary (Nature Chemical Biology 5, 436 - 440; 2009) Open access chemical and clinical probes to support drug discovery, say that drug discovery resources in academia and industry are not used efficiently, to the detriment of industry and society. Duplication could be reduced and productivity increased, they write, by performing basic biology and clinical proofs of concept within open access industry-academia partnerships. Chemical biologists could play a central role in this effort.
The authors' main argument is that the development of new medicines is being hindered by the way in which academia and industry advance innovative targets. By generating freely available chemical and clinical probes and performing open-access science, the overall system will produce a wider range of clinically validated targets for the same total resource, arguably the most effective way to spur the development of treatments for unmet needs.
In a related article in the same issue of the journal, 'A crowdsourcing evaluation of the NIH chemical probes', Tudor I. Opera et al. (Nature Chemical Biology 5, 441-447; 2009) write that between 2004 and 2008, the US National Institutes of Health Molecular Libraries and Imaging initiative pilot phase funded 10 high-throughput screening centres, resulting in the deposition of 691 assays into PubChem and the nomination of 64 chemical probes. The authors 'crowdsourced' the Molecular Libraries and Imaging initiative output to 11 experts, who expressed medium or high levels of confidence in 48 of these 64 probes. Crowdsourcing is a cross-disciplinary alternative way to assess confidence for both chemical probes and drug leads: it pools multiple levels of expertise from translational disciplines, providing a rigorous chemical-probe evaluation process.

Nature Chemical Biology website.
Nature Chemical Biology guide to authors.
Nature Chemical Biology focuses and supplements.
Nature Chemical Biology symposium 2009: Chemical biology in drug discovery.

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

This year is turning out to be an interesting one for research funding in the UK. Everyone wants the best science to be funded, but it's not clear that the proposed policy changes will achieve this. So begins the July Editorial in Nature Materials (8, 535; 2009), entitled Value for money.
In April, the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) introduced a policy intended to reduce the burden on those who referee the grant proposals by refusing to allow resubmissions of rejected submissions within 12 months. The reaction of angry researchers included a petition to government, and forced the EPSRC to amend the policy, though the basic premise remains. (See Peer to Peer for more details). Nature Materials asks whether this regulation will curtail new avenues of thought. "Researchers may shy away from more exploratory proposals in case failure prevents future applications for grants to extend established work...... X-ray and magnetic resonance imaging stem from fundamental physics research. The question arises as to whether this research would have been funded within the current system, but more importantly, it demonstrates the need to keep supporting blue-sky research."
How much is the UK government meddling with the science and research that it supports?, asks the Editorial. "The research councils have been asked to collectively generate £106 million of efficiency savings that will be put back into research. The Minister of State for Science and Innovation, Lord Drayson, asserted that the research councils themselves should decide how. The Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills stated: "The councils will be developing plans...to refocus their research programmes...into new priority areas such as the green economy (and) life sciences. Bearing in mind that the research councils have to describe how they distribute their funds to the government, it would seem unwise for the research councils to 'save' money by directing funds away from these priority areas."
Research councils, including the EPSRC and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), now require an economic impact plan to be included in each application. The opportunity to mention any likely economic outcomes was already present, but the new plan makes a more formal presentation obligatory. "Materials research is in a better position than most areas — for many materials scientists it is relatively simple to imagine a route from their basic research to practical applications that can affect society. It is therefore easy for the government to justify spending on these areas. A danger is that if expectations are not met, questions will be asked, even if a whole new branch of research has been discovered along the way. This could be perceived as lying to the tax-payer and ultimately worsen government and public perception......To reap the economic growth that the government believes science will provide, instead of debating the details, a significant increase in overall levels of research funding is needed."

Nature Materials journal website.
Nature Materials guide to authors.
Nature Materials on Twitter

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 01, 2009
Categories: Support | Permalink | Comments (0)