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Intellectual-property protection is a key driver of innovation, and researchers are always keen to file patents to shield their discoveries. Yet scientists often have an uninformed view of the value of their intellectual property. This naiveté slows down translational research. So concludes the November Editorial in Nature Medicine (15, 1229; 2009).
An informal poll conducted by the Nature Medicine editors revealed that "about two-thirds of scientists, particularly in Europe, don't know who owns the intellectual rights to the discoveries made in their labs. A similarly high proportion don't know if there are any provisions in their job contracts assigning them any rights over their discovery. And roughly half don't even know whether they are legally entitled to open a company based on their research." Ironically, states the Editorial, these are the very same scientists who dream of patenting their work and reaping the financial benefits. Before thinking about licenses (the essential first step), the Editorial continues, "it's important to realize that the decision to file a patent seldom rests with the scientists, but rather with the technology transfer office (TTO) of their institution. Strangely enough, although most of the scientists we surveyed were interested in patenting their work and knew about the importance of the TTO to this end, over 60% admitted to never having interacted with that office." After highlighting some of the problems concerning technology transfer offices and investor caution, the Editorial concludes:
"Translational researchers never shy away from the chance to present their science to anyone who might want to invest in it. But they would be well advised to start listening to companies, investors and their own TTOs to develop a better understanding of what they must bring to the table in order to attract financial support. Admittedly, there are very few places where scientists can learn how to engage in this dialogue, but the excuse that provides should be cold comfort given how important this is to the progress of translational research. The creation of forums of this sort should therefore become a priority for universities and research centers alike. A high-profile paper may allow you to get your foot in the door, but it won't be enough to open it."

See also the free Nature Medicine podcast, this month looking at the law in the context of the "patent cliff" which pharmaceutical companies are facing.

In other Nature Medicine news, the journal is organizing a colloquium on Systems Biology and HIV Vaccine Development on 8-10 February 2010 in Peachtree City, Georgia, USA. Participants will include HIV researchers and scientists using systems approaches in other areas of biomedical research, who will address how systems biology has provided insight into the immune response and into other areas of medicine, such as cancer and autoimmunity. Also on the agenda for discussion are the technical and bioinformatic challenges associated with using systems biology approaches; the gaps in HIV immunology that need to be resolved to develop an HIV vaccine; whether systems approaches can help to address these questions; and how 'systems vaccinology' approaches can be implemented in HIV vaccine development and clinical trial monitoring.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 12, 2009
Categories: Authorship, Communication, Conferences, Education | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is the text of a Correspondence in Nature (462, 35; 2009) by Irene Hames , an editor at The Plant Journal.
Goudarz Molaei is right to express concern in his Correspondence about simultaneous submission of manuscripts to different journals (Nature 461, 723; 2009). As a professional journal editor with more than 20 years' experience, I would like to highlight here a worrying new problem I recently encountered: duplicate submission arising from author impersonation.
Unfortunately, online submission and review systems inadvertently encourage this unwelcome activity. For example, a co-author or colleague may be given the corresponding author's account password in order to submit his or her manuscripts — perhaps because of the corresponding author's lack of time or unfamiliarity with file creation and uploading. These people are then able to change the author's accounts, including the passwords, and submit manuscripts in that person's name without their knowledge.
So, authors, be wary of who has access to your account. Keep a check on what's happening and change your password after files have been submitted.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 11, 2009
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two examples of open-source science are the subject of Opinion articles in this week's Nature. In the first of these, Timothy Gowers and Michael Nielsen describe their 'Polymath Project', which showed that many minds can work together to solve difficult mathematical problems, and reflect on the lessons learned for open-source science (Nature 461, 879-881; 2009). In the other article, Cameron Neylon says that Google Wave is the kind of open-source online collaboration tool that should drive scientists to wire their research and publications into an interactive data web (Nature 461, 881; 2009).
"Solving the current problems in science communication requires the intervention of strong companies such as Google", he writes. "But it will take more than technical advances to provoke scientists into taking full advantage of the web. We need pressure, and perhaps compulsion, from journals and funders to raise publishing standards to the new level made possible by such tools. Google Wave may not be, indeed is probably not, the whole answer. But it points the way to tools that build records and reproducibility into every step. And that has to be good for science."
Both these articles are free to read online for one week from the publication date (15 October).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on October 16, 2009
Categories: Authorship, Communication | Permalink | Comments (0)

Datasets released to public databases in advance of (or with) research publications should be given digital object identifiers to allow databases and journals to give quantitative citation credit to the data producers and curators, according to the October Editorial of Nature Genetics (41, 1045; 2009) .
After reviewing the arguments for assigning a citable credit to data, particularly those which are released publicly before formal publication in a journal, as is increasingly the case in some fields (and required by some funders), the Editorial asks: "What form should citable data identifiers take? They must work with existing unique resource identifier conventions and with the existing well-funded stable repositories used by research communities. However, these identifiers are not just for locating data but are for stably identifying the data units and versions with particular data producers, curators, funders and affiliations in a citable form. Because publications are currently the main source of scientific credit and because publishers have already developed citable digital object identifiers (DOI), it would seem to be their opportunity to grasp or to fumble. We propose citing DOIs that tag a combination of repository, database, accession, version, contributor and funder.
Of course, precise citation of all research output represents the bare minimum of respect for colleagues and competitors. This journal also endorses communication between data producers and data users. Whereas it is impossible for journals to restrict the use of data already in the public domain, we can show evidence of communication between producers and users to referees. Many funders of large resource projects now require a data release policy and plan for global analysis by the data producers. These parts of the successfully refereed grant should be published as a 'marker paper' or deposited in a citable preprint archive such as Nature Precedings. At very least, the details of the producers' work and intents should be available to users in a citable form in the database holding the data. Data users can submit an email demonstrating that they have contacted the data producers with their plan for use of the data and showing that they have read the producers' data release policy, conditions and plan for analysis."

Please see also the continuing Nature Network online discussions about pre-publication and post-publication data release. We welcome your views there.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on October 05, 2009
Categories: Authorship, Citation analysis, Data availability | Permalink | Comments (0)

The journal's October Editorial outlines new policies that refine the responsibilities of authors and require author contribution statements in Nature Chemical Biology research papers ( Nat. Chem. Bio. 5, 697; 2009):

"When a manuscript is submitted to Nature Chemical Biology, one author assumes the role of corresponding author. This individual, typically a principal investigator of the study, serves as the central point of contact for the manuscript and manages communication with the journal while the paper is under consideration. Corresponding authors also take responsibility for coordinating communication among the paper's authors and for certifying that all authors have agreed to the contents of the manuscript prior to submission. Our updated authorship policy now clarifies the corresponding author's role in managing the manuscript's author list: prior to submission, the corresponding author "ensures that all authors are included in the author list, its order has been agreed by all authors, and that all authors are aware that the paper was submitted".
Why are these changes needed? Because publication records remain an important metric for assessing the research productivity of individual scientists, it is essential that author lists are accurate and are determined in an objective and open manner. Most authorship disputes result from lack of clarity on two main points: (i) defining whether an individual's scientific contributions warrant authorship and (ii) determining the order of the author list. Obtaining agreement on these points is made more challenging by differences in authorship models among disciplines and individual laboratories, and by the fact that collaborative papers in interdisciplinary areas often include data from multiple research groups."
The Editorial goes on to describe further details of these policies, including the introduction of authors' contributions statements in published articles.
Nature journals' authorship policies.
Nature Chemical Biology guide to authors.
About the Nature Chemical Biology editors.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 29, 2009
Categories: Authorship, Policies | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Biotechnology's June issue contains several articles of particular interest to scientists as communicators, authors and entrepreneurs. Here are a few highlights:

Nature Biotechnology 27, 514 - 518 (2009).
Science communication reconsidered.
Tania Bubela et al.
As new media proliferate and the public's trust and engagement in science are influenced by industry involvement in academic research, an interdisciplinary workshop provides some recommendations to enhance science communication. Among these are that graduate students need to be taught about the social and political context of science and how to communicate with the media and a diversity of publics; that the factors contributing to media hype and errors (largely of omission) are explicitly recognized to allow science institutions and media organizations informed communication policies; research on science communication should be expanded to include online and digital media; more investment in the systematic tracking of news and cultural indicators, including traditional news outlets but also radio, entertainment TV, religious media, the web and new documentary genres; and a new 'science policy' beat in journalism courses to fill in the gaps between the technical backgrounders preferred by science writers and the conflict emphasis of political reporters. Finally, the authors argue, if there is a major threat to science journalism, it is that science journalists are losing their jobs at for-profit news organizations; new models of support for science journalism are needed, in which online digital formats blend professional reporting with user-generated content and discussion.

Nature Biotechnology 27, 528-530 (2009):
Maters of their universe.
Genentech—the biotech venture that launched a thousand companies—is no longer its own master. In March, majority stakeholder Roche reached an agreement with the South San Francisco, California–based company under which the Swiss drug maker would take over the biotech for $46.8 billion. But many remember those first years when a small team of bright, intellectually disciplined young scientists—often rowdy and personally eccentric people—got the company up and running. Randy Osborne and Laura DeFrancesco caught up with a few of those pioneers to talk about that era, their time and how they felt leading the charge.

Nature Biotechnology 27, 531 - 537 (2009).
Wasting cash—the decline of the British biotech sector.
Graham Smith, Muhammad Safwan Akram, Keith Redpath & William Bains
Undercapitalization and overgenerous boardroom compensation for management have been major contributors to the poor performance of UK biotech. Despite historic leadership in European biotech, the UK's industry has suffered a near collapse in the past two years and now has little private or public investment and no candidates for world-class companies. Why do shareholders allow UK public biotech companies to accumulate top management that pays itself so much, is unmotivated to drive shareholder value and as a consequence apparently drains the company of resources, notably cash? These questions, and others, are addressed in the feature.

Nature Biotechnology website.
Nature Biotechnology guide to authors.
Nature Biotechnology conference programme.
Nature Biotechnology focuses and supplements.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 25, 2009
Categories: Authorship, Conferences, Education, Ethics, Public and media, Publications | Permalink | Comments (0)

New rules for the presentation of statistics in the Nature journals are described in the June Editorial of Nature Cell Biology (11, 667; 2009). From the Editorial:

Thanks to advanced imaging technologies and better integration with molecular and systems approaches, cell biology is undergoing something of a renaissance as a quantitative science. Robust conclusions from quantitative data require a measure of their variability. Cell biology experiments are often intricate and measure complex processes. Consequently the number of independent repeats of a measurement can be limited for practical reasons, yet the variability of the measurements can be rather high. Cell biologists have developed good intuition to guide their analysis of such constrained datasets. Biological complexity and the reliance on intuition can cause culture shock to physical scientists crossing over into cell biology (a kind of extension of the celebrated 'two cultures' concept of C. P. Snow).
With the arrival of quantitative information and '-omic' datasets, statistical analysis becomes a necessity to complement instinct. The problem is that statistical tools are built on basic assumptions such as the independence of replicate measurements and the normality of data distribution. Usually, sizeable datasets are prerequisite for statistical analysis. Alas, these can be as hard come by as a biostatistician (n is typically well below 5). The result is that all too often statistics (frequently undefined 'error bars') are applied to data where they are simply not warranted.
There are no easy solutions to rectify the prevalence of poor statistics in cell biology studies. However, an obvious recommendation is to consult a statistician when planning quantitative experiments. Consider whether n represents independent experiments (you may actually be publishing a measure of the quality of your pipette!) and whether it is large enough for the test applied. Avoid showing statistics when they are not justified; instead, show 'typical' data or, better still, all the measurements. Importantly, displaying unwarranted statistics attributes a misleading level of significance to the data. Always describe and justify any statistical analysis applied. We have updated our guidelines to reflect these recommendations. One key rule: if the number of independent repeats is less than the fingers of one hand, show the actual measurements rather than error bars. If you wish to present error bars, include the actual measurements alongside them.
Finally, please remember that you are interrogating a complex system — be careful not to discard 'outlier' data points on a whim, as they may well be as relevant as clustered measurements. One is naturally inclined to ignore data that does not match the hypothesis tested, but biology is rarely as black and white as we would like. Do not make 'hypothesis driven' research become 'hypothesis forced'!

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 18, 2009
Categories: Authorship, Data availability, Disciplines, Format | Permalink | Comments (2)

Nature Immunology (10, 553; 2009), in its June Editorial, summarizes the new responsibilities Nature Publishing Group has established for authors.
'Author contributions' statements were introduced by the Nature journals in 2006 to encourate authors to identify the efforts of each coauthor. In a Nature Editorial last month (Nature 458, 1978; 30 April 2009), it was announced that all Nature journals now require that an 'author contributions' statement accompany all original research papers. Authors can decide how detailed these descriptions can be, but no author should be left out.
From the Nature Immunology Editorial:
The purpose of authorship statements is to give coauthors due credit for their relative contributions. This concern is not insignificant to a 'middle author', who may be seeking promotion or a new position. Such an investigator may not have a 'first author' publication to their record but nevertheless has provided a substantial contribution to the development or execution of certain studies. Likewise, for studies that result from the collaboration of multiple laboratories, authorship order can sometimes be difficult to ascribe. Identifying who did what provides greater transparency to the process of assigning authorship.
In the same Nature Editorial, new responsibilities were announced for 'senior authors'. These responsibilities include ensuring that the original data described in the study are preserved and retrievable for reanalysis, confirming that the data presented in the manuscript are representative of the original data collected, and anticipating and minimizing any obstacles to the sharing of data, reagents, materials or algorithms described in the published work. For collaborative studies, at least one senior author who represents their group must assume these responsibilities for their contributions to the study. Often the 'corresponding author' is the laboratory chief and is thus in a position of authority to speak for others in their group. But this is not always the case. Sometimes the laboratory head, acting as a mentor, will assign 'corresponding authorship' to another author as training toward the development of independent research career skills. However, the responsibilities outlined above would remain with the most senior researcher of the group, who is not necessarily the corresponding author.

NPG policies on authorship.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 26, 2009
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (0)

In its May Editorial, Nature Photonics (3, 237; 2009) describes some of the ways in which the Nature journals combat scientific misconduct and practices such as 'guest' authorship. Part of the Editorial concerns plagiarism:

"Many forms of plagiarism exist, but the goal is generally the same — to garner false or undue credit. Plagiarism sometimes involves reuse of another author's published work, but it is commonly thought that the most typical tool of the plagiarist is self-plagiarism: the reuse of substantial parts of an author's own published work, particularly without appropriate referencing, and less commonly, duplicate publication, in which the results are recycled in their entirety.
The peer-review process provides a net for catching offenders, but it cannot provide a fail-safe barrier. As a result, Nature Photonics is now starting to use the plagiarism-detection software CrossCheck, which makes comparative checks between provided manuscripts and those previously published and in an existing database. Any manuscript that seems to show an abnormally high match will be immediately investigated. Unfortunately, plagiarism can also occur without verbatim duplication of words or data. And it is here that the lines between normal and acceptable activity and plagiarism become smeared, and the likelihood of detection and punitive repercussions is diminished.
Using another researcher's arguments and logic, even if the text is not identical, without due reference is intellectual plagiarism. This type of plagiarism can be subtle and as simple as not including a reference to a highly relevant previous paper. Citation-related plagiarism, whether it is intentional, or due to gross negligence, can give an untruthful impression of precedence, reassigning credit from the original discoverer to another person.
When reporting scientific messages, it is an author's responsibility to find and acknowledge the critically relevant literature, or at least to have endeavoured to do so with rigour. Failing this can result in falsely apportioned claims, albeit caused by negligence.
If plagiarism is suspected in research results published by us, it is our policy to conduct an immediate investigation and if deemed appropriate to contact the author's institute and funding agencies and consider a formal retraction of the paper. Although it is often the first authors who have historically borne the brunt of confirmed misconduct allegations, our editorial policies highlight the serious responsibilities of all coauthors: "submission to a Nature journal is taken by the journal to mean that all the listed authors have agreed to the content". It is unreasonable to expect each author to be responsible for every aspect of the paper, but it is the responsibility of the corresponding author to manage the understanding that all authors are expected to have made reasonable attempts to check the findings submitted to a journal for publication."

The full text of this Nature Photonics Editorial.
Nature Photonics guide to authors.
About the Nature Photonics editors.
Nature journals policy on plagiarism.
Nature journals policy on authorship.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 04, 2009
Categories: Authorship, Ethics, Policies | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here is the text of an Editorial in the 30 April issue of Nature (458, 1078; 2009 - free to access online):
The Nature journals encourage authors to treat their data and their collaborators with the respect that their communities demand. High-profile journals have a duty to reinforce the trends towards greater transparency and to help scientists to fulfil their responsibilities as researchers and authors. We are therefore introducing small but important changes in our policies to reflect these goals.
In a previous Editorial (Nature 450, 1; 2007), we asked for feedback about whether we should require senior or corresponding authors to sign a statement that they had taken some specific 'integrity insurance' steps before the manuscript was submitted. Some applauded this idea, but most were not in favour. (Some of the feedback can be seen here.) Major doubts were expressed about the ability of corresponding authors to take on such responsibility given the diversity of collaborations. The belief was also expressed that such signed statements would too often be worthless box-ticking exercises. Although we regretfully accept these realities, we believe that we should go further in spelling out the responsibilities of co-authors, and in requiring an implicit acceptance of them.
Accordingly, we have modified the Nature journal policy on authorship, which is detailed on our website. For papers submitted by collaborations, we now delineate the responsibilities of the senior members of each collaboration group on the paper. Before submitting the paper, at least one senior member from each collaborating group must take responsibility for their group's contribution. Three major responsibilities are covered: preservation of the original data on which the paper is based, verification that the figures and conclusions accurately reflect the data collected and that manipulations to images are in accordance with Nature journal guidelines, and minimization of obstacles to sharing materials, data and algorithms through appropriate planning.
Corresponding authors have multiple responsibilities, but we now make it clearer that the author list should include all appropriate researchers and no others, and that the order has been agreed to by all authors. They are expected to have notified all authors when the manuscript was submitted, they are the point of contact with the editor and they must communicate any matters that arise after publication to their co-authors.
Another change is that we have strengthened our policy for statements of authors' contributions. This policy was first introduced nearly 10 years ago (Nature 399, 393; 1999) to make the credit due to individual co-authors more explicit. Since then, authors of Nature papers have had the opportunity to include in their papers a statement that details each author's role in the published work. Over the past 10 years, the proportion of authors who choose to include this has risen dramatically.
This acceptance, and discussions with authors who have chosen not to include such a statement, has led us to change our policy. Rather than 'strongly encouraging' such statements, we now require them for publication of original research papers in Nature and the Nature research journals. The detail provided can vary tremendously and authors are left to structure them as they see fit. We insist only that no author be left out.
To ensure that authors are familiar with these changes, we will shortly require the corresponding author to confirm that he or she has read the Nature journal policies on author responsibilities and is submitting the manuscript in accordance with those policies.

Nature journals' authorship policies.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 30, 2009
Categories: Authorship, Ethics, Policies | Permalink | Comments (2)

John Dick, the subject of this month's Q&A at Nature Reports Stem Cells (April 2009), identified the first cancer stem cell, in leukaemia. The widely used xenotransplantation assay that he developed can confirm the identity of prospective haematopoietic stem cells by demonstrating their ability to re-establish a human blood system in the mouse. He is a professor at the University of Toronto and its affiliated Princess Margaret Hospital and Director of the Program in Cancer Stem Cells at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. Monya Baker, Editor of Nature Reports Stem Cells investigates his call for more controversy.
Q: What's the best advice you've ever received as a scientist?
A: Everyone in science has to have an ego. You have to think: Here's a question that nobody knows an answer to, and I think I can come up with a way to answer that question. Of course you always want to answer the questions that nobody has answered before, but if an experiment is worth doing, it's worth doing even if there are a number of people also trying to get the answer. If someone else gets there first, it just means that you can go on faster to the next question.
Read more at Nature Reports Stem Cells.
Nature Reports Stem Cells home page.
The Niche, the blog of Nature Reports Stem Cells.
About Nature Reports Stem Cells.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 22, 2009
Categories: Authorship, Publications | Permalink | Comments (0)

In its April Editorial, Nature Genetics (41, 383; 2009) addresses the issue of contributor attribution in PubMed, the index provided by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) and used by many researchers to navigate tens of millions of biomedical publications dating back to 1948.
Nature Genetics, in common with many other journals, regularly receives queries from authors about how to format their manuscripts so that authors are correctly credited. As stated in the Editorial, "The short answer is that authors must be listed in the paper's byline (the author list under the title) or identified elsewhere in the paper as authors to appear as authors in PubMed. PubMed curators can also identify and index consortium collaborators identified as such within the paper. If contributors are listed as consortium members, but not identified as authors, they will appear in PubMed only as collaborators."
But the questions don't stop there. Journals are increasingly being asked about how authors can ensure "equal authorship" is represented in PubMed or why the email address for the corresponding author does not always appear in PubMed, for example. Journals provide this type of information as XML tags ('metadata'), but what happens to it when it reaches its destination?
Authors need to be able to provide documentation of their roles in their consortium papers to funders for grants and to committees for career advancement. So that journals can provide this information consistently, unique author-controlled identifiers will need to be universally adopted and linked in publisher metadata. Nature Genetics suggests that instead of being controlled by any organization, "even one as central to everyday research as NLM's invaluable indexing service", there needs to be "agreed conventions that allow authors and third-party indices to offer distributed solutions for different applications. All of these solutions would be fed by the metadata provided by authors with their word processors and by publishers with their tagging schemas."
The Editorial continues: "Our recommendation is that PubMed should leave the publisher-supplied metadata as it is supplied if it has ambitions to provide the more detailed author affiliations that authors frequently ask us about. Authors, please think whether you would welcome the wider adoption of existing technical conventions that allow universal and distributed appreciation of your growing reputation, or whether you would rather continue to muddle along trying to extract a reputation from the slowly-evolving customs of a national central library. Whatever solution we end up with, we should keep clear the distinctions between research data collection, analysis and writing."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 08, 2009
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (2)

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)

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)

An international author identification system could allow scientists to receive credit for all their scientific contributions and would solve the problem of identity in a world of limited surnames. This is the premise of an article in the December issue of EMBO Reports (9, 1171-1174; 2008) by Howard Wolinsky. Not a new premise, by any means, but are we any closer to achieving this end? And what are the pros and cons?
Timo Hannay, publishing director of nature.com is quoted in the article: "I'd love a user of Nature.com to be able to click on an author's name and to be able to see a list of everything that we publish by them. And that kind of thing, which seems really trivial, should be very straightforward, but actually isn't because we don't have identifiers associated with them ... We've got a world in which scientists have assigned numbers to all kinds of things: to genes, to species, to stars, to molecules, to the articles they write. The one thing they left out was themselves.....A global author ID does bring you the same benefits that you already have from [a] unique article ID, and you can locate an article very quickly and easily online if you know what its DOI [digital object identifier] is."
The article goes on to describe some of the challenges and complexities of this apparently simple goal (which is, in fact, anything but simple). One issue is whether people would want to assign themselves such a number in principle, given concerns about privacy and possible misuses. Another is the extent of cooperation that would be required by many publishers, databases, institutions and other organizations, as well as the interoperability of their technical systems.
Wolinsky concludes: "In the end, whether an author ID system is a universal database or a connected and compatible network of databases, it has to serve the needs of the scientific community. There is a careful balance to be struck between giving credit where credit is due and knowing everything about everyone. Where that balance lies will be up to the community and those who collaborate to make such a system a reality."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 11, 2008
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (1)

Publishing a paper in a journal has traditionally marked the end of a research project, but increasing numbers of academics are becoming interested in the publication process itself, according to the Editorial in the November issue of Nature Nanotechnology (3, 633; 2008). Many of these 'papers about papers' are concerned with citations and impact factors — researchers looking to get more citations for their papers are advised to write longer papers, work in teams or write the first paper on a topic (references in the Editorial). However, other authors have started to look behind the scenes at issues such as the changing nature of collaboration. The Editorial goes on to discuss some of these issues, including the h-index, a relatively recent yet controversial method of assessing a scientist's output.
Previous Nautilus posts about the h-index.
Previous Nautilus posts about authorship.
Previous Nautilus posts about citation analysis.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 18, 2008
Categories: Authorship, Citation analysis, Quality measures | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is the text of a Correspondence from Nature 455, 1175 (2008) by Kenneth R. Jolls of Iowa State University:

In your 'Big data' issue, Felice Frankel and Rosalind Reid call for an "investment in visual communication training for young scientists" to prepare them for modern methods of data representation ('Distilling meaning from data' Nature 455, 30; 2008). But the problem goes deeper than that.
Graphic artists who collaborate with scientists have often been shaped by the other of C. P. Snow's 'two cultures'. Although well-intentioned, many artists' understanding of basic science is inadequate for meaningful participation in high-level technical work. Cognitive art is like commercial art and technical writing: it has never garnered respect from the artistic establishment, and its practitioners are left to fend for themselves.
From the start of schooling, distinctions are made between students with a talent for science and those with leanings towards the arts. In our technology-focused society, science receives more attention and an emphasis that does not include visual-thinking skills. Calculus, for example, is learned through symbolic operations, but portraying those procedures by using curves and surfaces and tangents and intercepts is typically considered to be an unnecessary frill.
Thus the two cultures diverge, and if we try to reassemble them later to let one benefit the other, we have serious difficulties: the world views don't match. Subjective ideas can be stifled by objective thought but, by the same token, physical reality can be mismanaged by well-meaning attempts at creativity.
We must indeed invest in visualization skills for science-bound students, but there should be a parallel path for science-illustrators-to-be to learn the basics of physics, chemistry and mathematics. Collaborators who understand each other's language have a much better chance of finding the common ground they need for the cooperation they seek.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 13, 2008
Categories: Authorship, Education | Permalink | Comments (0)

The fourth anniversary of Nature Methods' arrival on the publishing scene and a change in leadership offer an opportunity for reflection and editorial fine-tuning, as described in the journal's November Editorial (5, 911; 2008).
From the Editorial: "When Nature Methods made its debut in October 2004, just over 4 years ago, it was an anxious but exciting time for our founding chief editor Veronique Kiermer and manuscript editors Nicole Rusk and Daniel Evanko. We were all novices at scientific publishing and more comfortable calibrating a pipette than editing a fledgling journal." The Editorial goes on to outline developments and other changes at the journal since then. Veronique is taking on the role of publisher for Nature Methods and Nature Protocols, and Daniel is taking over as Chief Editor of Nature Methods. Reviews, Perspectives and Research Highlights are to be expanded, while the Protocols section is closing. (Authors are encouraged to submit their protocols to the online publication Nature Protocols.) The Editorial concludes: "We hope that our journal has helped dispel the notion that methods are less important than results and deserving only of small print at the end of a paper. Debunking this myth has been and will continue to be our main mission. We will persist in our efforts to bring you, every month, a journal that allows methods to be featured prominently in their own right—as the cornerstones upon which results are based."
Nature Methods guide to authors.
How to submit to Nature Methods.
Aims and scope of the journal.
Methagora, the Nature Methods blog.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 10, 2008
Categories: Authorship, Data availability, Publications | Permalink | Comments (0)

G. N. Greaves of Aberystwyth Univesity and co-authors write in a Commentary in Nature Materials 7, 827-839 (2008):
"The world's first dedicated X-ray synchrotron radiation storage ring, the Synchrotron Radiation Source or SRS (Fig. 1), is closing down this autumn after 27 years of operation. Designed, built and commissioned at Daresbury Laboratory in less than four years, it thrust the United Kingdom into a world-leading position in 19801, delivering the first uninterrupted beams of intense X-rays. Since then, the use of synchrotron X-rays has led to major advances in both fundamental and applied science, which at the SRS has ranged from the structure of glass to catalysts in operation, from the crystallography of proteins to elements at high pressure, and from semiconductor surfaces to the magnetism of atomic layers, to take just a few examples. The SRS has had a substantial role in what has truly become a revolution in characterization science. With over 5,000 papers published, research and instrumentation from the SRS continues to influence facilities across the world."
The authors review the range of fields of science in which the SRS has made significant contributions, calculating that since 1981 "the SRS has served a staggering 11,000 individual users from 25 countries, and been the training ground of over 4,000 doctorate students and 2,000 post-doctorate researchers. With materials research making up around 40% of this research programme, the legacy of the SRS in this field is enormous. We have picked out examples where the international impact of the SRS has been particularly impressive, but there are many more: developments in industrial materials, biomaterials, electrochemical materials and, very recently, heritage materials. The international conference series, 'Synchrotron Radiation in Materials Science', which began in Chester, UK, in 1994, charts this progress and involvement of the SRS over the years. Indeed, many of the new concepts, experiments, theory and instrumentation in X-ray science owe their origins to research at Daresbury, starting 27 years ago when the SRS heralded the age of dedicated synchrotron radiation.
It is worth reflecting on the relatively short time taken for authorization to build the SRS by the then Science Research Council. The decision in the late 1970s followed the briefest of approval procedures compared with the current process-driven practice of seeking the widest consultation before dipping into the public purse. If the gut-reaction decision to build the SRS had taken any longer, it would have jeopardized its place as a world-first and, more importantly, the confidence to build new science over the next generation — much of which has been internationally leading and continues to influence the synchrotron radiation community worldwide."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 04, 2008
Categories: Authorship, Careers, Education | Permalink | Comments (1)

Raf Aerts of the Division of Forest, Nature and Landscape, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, writes in Nature Correspondence (454, 575; 2008):

Litera scripta manet: 'written words will endure'. But not, it seems, in the case of the e-mail addresses of corresponding authors in the scientific literature.
To investigate the survival rate of author e-mail addresses, I sent an e-mail to the first one hundred corresponding authors of peer-reviewed papers whose addresses were returned in a Google Scholar search for 2007 and 2003. Roughly one out of five messages was undeliverable in 2008 (from 2007: 17%; 2003: 25%), indicating that those e-mail addresses were no longer valid.
E-mail addresses of scientists, particularly those without tenure, are volatile. Researchers leave behind a trail of obsolete e-mail addresses, phone numbers and fax numbers in the printed literature.
Unique digital author identifiers, as proposed in Correspondence (Nature 453, 979; 2008), could be linked to up-to-date e-mail addresses and other contact information. This would increase the traceability of authors, facilitate scientific networking, and even speed up the peer-review process.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on August 29, 2008
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (0)

Raf Aerts of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven writes in Correspondence in Nature (453, 979; 2008):
Several Correspondences, including 'Give south Indian authors their true names' (Nature 452, 530; 2008) and 'Name variations can hit citation rankings' (Nature 453, 450; 2008), have illustrated difficulties in identifying authors and their papers, citations and h-index.
In an academic world in which decisions on promotion and funding often depend on the applicant's scientific impact, an incorrect publication or citation record in an online database can be very inconvenient. Scopus and Thomson's Web of Science, which make available abstract and citation databases, acknowledge the issue and have come up with solutions: the Author Identifier and ResearcherID, respectively.
These systems assign an identifying code to each author. Unfortunately, a single author can have more than one Author Identifier in Scopus (I am cryptically known as 7006716603 and 16551750300). And as only invited researchers can register for a number, ResearcherID is not yet used as a unique author key in the Web of Science — making it difficult to differentiate me from a highly cited ecologist from the Netherlands, despite the 'Distinct Author Sets' feature.
If it is possible to have DOIs for objects (or, so they say, enough IPv6 addresses for every molecule on Earth), why is it so difficult to implement DAIs for authors?
(See the author and reviewers' website for more about DOIs, or digital object identifers.)

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 24, 2008
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to the Editorial in the June issue of Nature Nanotechnology 3, 309 (2008), "when the papers published so far in Nature Nanotechnology are classified according to the country in which the corresponding author was based at the time, we find that 47.6% of them come from the US, followed by 8% from the UK, 7.4% from Japan and 6.7% from Germany.
Classifying papers according to the affiliation of the corresponding author is clearly an approximation, but given the fact that papers can contain ten or more authors with affiliations in three or more countries, it is necessary to make such approximations if we want to understand which areas of the world are strongest" in a particular discipline.

The Editorial goes on to explain some of its "authorship" assumptions used for its analysis of several journals that publish high-quality research in the nanotechnology, leading to the conclusion that "although the number of nanotechnology papers published by Chinese researchers is increasing rapidly, the US and Europe continue to lead in terms of quality."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 12, 2008
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (0)

Biji T. Kurien of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation writes (Nature 453; 450; 2008):
The Correspondence 'Give south Indian authors their true names' (Nature 452, 530; 2008) and earlier News Feature 'Identity crisis' (Nature 451, 766–767; 2008) are highly relevant to calculations of PubMed citations and h-index (the number n of a researcher's papers that have received at least n citations).
For example, I used to use the south Indian form of my name: T. Biji Kurien, with Biji being my personal name. I have seven publications cited incorrectly in PubMed as being by 'Kurien, T. B.', 'Bijikurien, T.' or 'Kurien, B.'. Four of these entries were cited often enough to be counted towards my h-index computation. As I had by then changed my name to conform with Western style, these publications unfortunately do not appear in the Web of Science or PubMed under my current name format. Consequently, my h-index ranking has fallen by 25% .
It is of paramount importance to adhere to a consistent name pattern right from the start, in order to maintain a correct list of publications in the public databases as well as the right h-index rankings.

Prabhu B. Patil, of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, writes in the same issue of Nature (453, 450; 2008):
The Correspondence 'Give south Indian authors their true names' (Nature 452, 530; 2008), incorrectly states that people from the south do not traditionally have surnames.
I am from southern India and have a proper surname — as do all the families in my region. Besides Patil, surnames such as Naidu, Reddy, Rao and Gouda are common in the different states of southern India. One of the authors of the Correspondence has the surname Kutty.
Surnames have widely fallen into disuse because our fathers and forefathers avoided using them to prevent discrimination on grounds of caste.
It doesn't make sense in this case to use only an author's first name in scientific publications and to devise a special system to accommodate a different naming format. Instead, editors should encourage these authors to revive the use of their surnames.

Comments are welcome here and at Indigenus, the blog of Nature India.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 04, 2008
Categories: Authorship, Citation analysis | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Biotechnology's May Editorial (26, 476; 2008) adds its perspective to previous discussion in Nature, Spoonful of Medicine (the blog of Nature Medicine) and at Nature Network about 'ghost authors' on clinical research papers from Merck. According to Nature Biotechnology, papers from the pharmaceutical industry are being unfairly stigmatized because of one company's past poor publishing practices. Nature Biotechnology welcomes some recommendations made in an Editorial about the affair in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) (299, 1833–1835; 2008), such as conflict of interest and 'author contribution' statements, but goes on to add: "the JAMA editorial then goes too far, leaping on the findings to make recommendations that are unwarranted, not to say discriminatory, against the body corporate. In recommendation 4, for example, the editors imply that any research associated with "industry" is potentially tainted. In essence, the editorial calls for journal editors to take into account all financial support and financial relationships when deciding whether to publish a manuscript at all." After providing additional examples, the Nature Biotechnology Editorial concludes:
"Ghostwriting and guest authorship run contrary to the Corinthian spirit of scientific publishing. Although that spirit may have disappeared since the days when science was the exclusive province of the enthusiastic and moneyed amateur, companies that use ghostwriters and rubber-stamp experts as authors of their papers reinforce the impression that industry's only interest in publishing is to dress up marketing as science. But the editors of JAMA and other journals would do well to focus on content, not process. JAMA's attack casts a cloud over the entire industry. Stigmatizing any paper that comes from the private sector on the basis of an analysis of one company's poor publishing practices over five years ago is not only unjustified, it is discrimination pure and simple."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 21, 2008
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (0)

The eternal question of authorship is in the frame in a News story in the current issue of Nature (452, 791; 2008), in which it is reported that thousands of of documents relating to Merck’s withdrawn painkiller rofecoxib (Vioxx) were were reviewed by medical researchers, and seem to show Merck’s extensive involvement in ghost-writing and ‘guest authorship’ of research and review papers. The results of the analysis are published by J. Ross et al. in the Journal of the American Medical Association (299, 1800–1812; 2008).
By omitting the names — or downgrading the involvement — of drug-industry writers, and adding the names of academics who were not substantially involved in a paper, the industry’s role in research may be concealed. And doctors may be misled over the independence of the work. For example, one of the Merck-held documents lists a number of clinical trials in which a Merck employee is to be author of the first draft of a manuscript. However, when these trials were published, in 16 of 20 of the articles an external academic is listed as first author. Merck denies these allegations.
See also Spoonful of Medicine, the blog of Nature Medicine.
There is further discussion of the JAMA article, and the implications for authorship credit, at Nature Network.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 21, 2008
Categories: Authorship, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (1)

Juan-Carlos Lopez discusses the publication process from the authors' perspective in a couple of posts at Spoonful of Medicine, the blog of Nature Medicine. First, he shares some data to show that the Nature journals are not biased in favour of authors based in the United States. The data shown are the ratio of submitted to published papers as a function of country. Take a look.
In a subsequent post, Juan-Carlos describes a talk he gave recently in Madrid, at which he showed these data (and received some puzzling feedback), and also was asked questions about open-access publishing. He writes: "It was fascinating to see how difficult it was for some people to understand that scientific publishing costs money, and that there are different models to recover your costs -- the author-pays model, the subscription model, and everything in between ...... as there are different models, publishing groups ought to choose the model that works best for each of them. In our case, the subscription-based model is the only one that seems viable for the time being. How difficult is it to get this point?"
There has been some discussion related to this topic over at Nature Network in the past week, summarized here at the blog Gobbledygook. Part of this discussion involves the latest NIH (US National Institutes of Health) policy on self-archiving of research that it has funded, requiring deposition of the author's version into the PubMedCentral database 12 months after the journal's publication date. For authors who aren't sure how this affects them when submitting to Nature journals, the new NIH policy is consistent with Nature Publishing Group's existing policy, which states: "When a manuscript is accepted for publication in an NPG journal, authors are encouraged to submit the author's version of the accepted paper (the unedited manuscript) to PubMedCentral or other appropriate funding body's archive, for public release six months after publication. In addition, authors are encouraged to archive this version of the manuscript in their institution's repositories and, if they wish, on their personal websites, also six months after the original publication."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 16, 2008
Categories: Access, Authorship | Permalink | Comments (0)

Raf Aerts, on his Nature Network blog African Blog of Ecology, writes about the relentless increase in the number of multi-authored manuscripts. He reproduces a graph from the magazine Science Watch (November/December 2007 edition) which tracks papers grouped into four tranches of more than 50, 100, 200 and 500 authors. Between 1993 and 2003, the numbers of papers with these large numbers of authors were fairly stable, but after that time, the numbers in all categories increased significantly (to 2007). Raf Aerts writes:

"But then came the cracker: in 2000 there was a report with 918 authors, and the current record holder is physics paper published in 2006… with 2512 authors. Imagine all these authors track-changing the manuscript!"

At Nature, and many other journals, the editors ask one author to coordinate revisions and changes between all coauthors, and convey those to the journal on behalf of all of them. The challenge for the poor corresponding author must be quite significant on occasion.

Why do papers need so many authors? Modern, "big" science means that a paper can take years to gestate, involving researchers at many centres, international facilities (for expensive equipment, for example), and complex software. Martin Fenner, in a comment to Raf Aert's post, writes: "In my last published paper I have 82 coauthors, my personal record. The paper is the result of a consensus conference on the management of testicular cancer."

The papers tracked by Science Watch do not cover the "ten-author" paper in which a couple of professors might use their seniority muscle to add their names to an author list even though they made no contribution to the intellectual or physical effort of creating the paper. Is this type of paper making more of a mockery of the concept of "authorship" than the several-hundred author collaboration? How else would these researchers receive deserved credit for their work?

The Nature journals appreciate the problems, but wish authors to be transparent with their readers -- as we do not want to support the practice of honorary authorship, while being sympathetic to genuine collaborations. We encourage coauthors of a paper to specify their contributions to the work, in a statement in the acknowledgements. Our policies, as well as (free-access) editorials in our journals on this topic, are gathered at the Author and Reviewers' website; and our discussions of authorship on Nautilus are gathered under the tag "authorship", which you can see listed by clicking on this link. We welcome your views, which can be made online as a comment to any of these posts.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 28, 2008
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chinese authors are publishing more and more papers, but are they receiving due credit and recognition for their work? Not if their names get confused along the way. Jane Qiu investigates these, and other questions, in a Nature news feature in the current issue of the journal (Nature 451, 766-767; 2008). The article covers the huge problem of how to distinguish between Asian researchers, given the vast numbers of people sharing relatively few surnames. The problem is particularly challenging in the publishing sphere, not only in identifying an author correctly in citation databases and other indeces, but for editors in choosing appropriate peer-reviewers. Asian researchers suffer in being hampered from full participation in the international scientific community, for example they are less likely to be invited to contribute to conferences, to be successful in grant applications or to win awards.
The news feature provides a clear overview of these issues, and more, from a range of perspectives. Some journals have begun to provide author names in original (not Latin) characters, and there are various initiatives to provide unique author identifiers. At this stage, however, there is no consensus as to the best way to proceed: there are problems of technical compatibility between publishing, database and indexing systems, of agreement on universal standards, and other challenges, such as the high mobility of scientists, making it difficult to track the author of several publications.
Nature Network has a forum "What's in an Asian name?", in which several Asian and other researchers provide their perspective of this challenging issue for publishers and database curators. A Nautilus post last year highlighted the efforts of the Human Frontiers Program to help Japanese and other Asian scientists to improve their international visibility.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 19, 2008
Categories: Authorship, Format, Publishing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Materials gets to grips with the issue of authorship this month, in a freely available Editorial (Nature Materials 7, 91; 2008) about international guidelines that define authorship as "limited to those who have made a significant scientific contribution to the concept, design, execution, or interpretation of the research study". This definition, used by many journals in their author guidelines, becomes imprecise in some circumstances, as identified in the Nature Materials editorial:
"A classic example is the case in which an experimental facility has been used to obtain some of the data. Without the work of scientists employed to run that facility those results could not be obtained. But is their contribution to the specific work enough to warrant authorship, or would acknowledgements be more appropriate? What about the director of the facility? Should the contribution of technicians warrant authorship in general? What about collaborators that helped obtain funding that was used for the work? And what about reviewers, who in some cases substantially help improve a paper, but whose contribution is mainly editorial?" The Editorial points out the difficulties in implementing clear-cut rules, but urges institutions not only to clarify and unify codes of conduct, but also to ensure that the scientists they employ and/or fund appreciate their importance.
It is the policy of the Nature journals to encourage co-authors of papers to specify their individual contributions. Full details are provided at our authors' and reviewers' website.
The full-text of the Nature Materials Editorial can be read here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 04, 2008
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Any issue of Nature today has nearly the same number of Articles and Letters as one from 1950, but about four times as many authors. The lone author has all but disappeared. In most fields outside mathematics, fewer and fewer people know enough to work and write alone. If they could, and could spare the time and effort to do so, their funding agencies and home institutions would not permit it." So writes Mott Greene of the University of Puget Sound in his recent (single-author, naturally) Nature essay "The demise of the lone author" (Nature 450, 1165; 2007).
Professor Greene goes on to discuss how this practice is affecting, and will affect, the system of awarding credit for work done, predicting that "in those fields where multiple authorship endangers the author credit system, we shall soon see institutionally initiated restriction on the number of authors. Paradoxically, this is likely to be endorsed by all parties as preferable to cinema-style specification of who actually did what. Most will prefer full credit for a few papers to little or no credit for many, considering where it matters most: university committees in charge of tenure, promotion and salary increments based on scholarly production. Given Nature's role in determining, as well as chronicling, how science is reported (see Nature 450, 1; 2007), interested parties could watch these pages to see whether a trend towards more restricted authorship is emerging."

Nature's policy on author contribution statements is here, and was introduced in an Editorial here.
Professor Greene's article is also available on the beautiful website that celebrates the history of the journal Nature.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 10, 2008
Categories: Authorship, Careers, Quality measures | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ai Lin Chun, one of the editors of Nature Nanotechnology, writes about the column in the journal Top Down Bottom Up (example at this link), which highlights the multidisciplinary nature of nanoscience and nanotechnology by going “behind the scenes” to explore how collaborations occur and work together. Collaborations could be between two or more different disciplines (for example, physical scientists and biomedical researchers) or between academic departments and industrial researchers. The name of the section is intended to suggest how researchers with different expertise come at a problem from different directions.
If you have an interesting collaboration, please drop Ai Lin a line at her Nature Nanotechnology network group -- and she might pick your collaboration to highlight in the journal.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 28, 2007
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (0)

Michael Kenward starts a debate in Nature Network's science writers' group called Science experiments in accessibility, in which he highlights the journal Science's trial project of starting each Research Article with a one-page author's summary. Michael sees two benefits for science writers: one, to help authors to produce accessible summaries; and another to use the summaries to write more easily and confidently about the research.
Following this post is an online discusssion about the benefits to the reader of different types of summary which you may find stimulating, and to which you are welcome to contribute, or comment here. Typical summaries provided by journals range from News and Views-style editorials (articles by independent scientists in the field about a new finding), to short author summaries, to "making the paper" (interviews with an author featured on Nature's author page in the journal every week), to "inside the paper" (editors' accounts of how the paper evolved from submission to acceptance during the peer-review process) to one-paragraph editors' summaries, to science journalism, to blog posts, to podcasts. What kind of reader finds what kind of summary most useful? Would authors welcome the additional task of writing one-page summaries?

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 21, 2007
Categories: Author services, Authorship, Communication, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)

In an article neatly titled the write position, Jonathan D. Wren et al. in the current issue of EMBO Reports ( 8, 11, 998-991; 2007 ) survey perceived contributions to papers in biomedical fields based on byline position and number of authors. They undertook the study because publications in peer-reviewed journals are a major criterion for assessing scientists for promotion, tenure or funding, yet not all authors are viewed as equal contributors. Qualitatively, those listed first or last in the byline are generally apportioned more credit for the work than middle authors, but it is not known exactly how much authors are perceived to contribute from their byline position.
To attempt a quantitative assessment, the authors surveyed chairpeople of promotion and tenure committees, and found that respondents felt that the first author in a three-person byline had made the greatest contribution to the work performed, whereas the last author deserved most credit for both the initial conception and supervision of the project. There was no significant difference in three-author compared with five-author bylines for the credit apportioned to the last author for initial conception, work performed or supervision.
In addition, nearly half of the repondents agreed that granting authorship to someone who does not meet journal authorship criteria is common. Adding authors to a publication apparently does not affect the relative overall credit afforded to the last author, but the perceived contributions of all other authors suffer a drop in value.
For details of survey response rates and percentages, as well as further information, please see the full report at the EMBO Reports website.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 12, 2007
Categories: Authorship | Permalink | Comments (1)

As part of our ongoing discussion about the accountability of authors and co-authors (comments are still very welcome), I decided to take a snapshot look at the popularity of Author Contributions statements in Nature. We strongly encourage authors to make these statments, specifying the ways in which the authors contributed to the paper, but we do not make it mandatory. Should that change? Part of the answer to that question lies in how useful authors find the idea. So it is of interest to note that in the past three or four issues of Nature, about half of the Articles and Letters (primary research) carried contributions statements. Here are some examples, all from the same issue of Nature (1 November 2007):

J.L., J.R.S. and J.W.L. conceived the Brainbow strategies. J.R.S. and J.W.L. supervised the project. J.L. built initial constructs and validated them in vitro and in vivo. T.A.W. performed all cerebellar axonal tracing and colour profile analysis with programs developed with J. Lu. H.K. performed all live imaging experiments. R.W.D. generated Brainbow-1.0 lines expressing cytoplasmic XFPs, and R.A.B. generated Brainbow-1.1 constructs and lines. J.L., T.A.W. and R.W.D. screened mouse lines.

S.H.C. designed and performed experiments, analysed data and wrote the paper; N.C., M.T. and J.M.G. designed and performed experiments; D.R. and M.B.G. developed analytical tools; and C.I.B. designed experiments, analysed data and wrote the paper.
(more on the post continuation page)

Continue reading "Author contributions audit" »

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 05, 2007
Categories: Authorship, Categories, Policies | Permalink | Comments (4)

This week's Nature addresses how the responsibilities of co-authors for a scientific paper’s integrity could be made more explicit (Nature 450, 1; 2007). The text of the (free access) editorial:

The two most notorious frauds of modern science, by the stem-cell biologist Woo Suk Hwang and the physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, both brought into question the responsibilities of co-authors in the oversight of their colleagues’ work. But despite the concerns raised after these episodes, there remains a need for a clearer understanding, both within a collaboration and by readers of the eventual papers, of the various contributions made by the authors not only to the research but also to safeguarding its integrity.
One welcome development in transparency was pioneered by the medical journals. Authorship of a paper is justified when a researcher has contributed significantly to the work being described and to the writing or approval of the manuscript. But the traditional publication style is entirely opaque as to which co-author contributed what. Concern about ‘honorary authorship’ — in which an author is unacceptably included for reasons other than any scientific contribution — and about this lack of transparency has led to the increasing use of statements in papers that specify authors’ contributions. Some medical journals require them, and others, including the Nature family, strongly encourage their use and may yet make them compulsory.
Such statements delineate contributions to the work but do not underwrite its integrity. Something more is needed.
It is too glib to state that every co-author of a paper shares full responsibility for its content. A researcher who specializes in the radio-active dating of rock strata cannot necessarily be expected to vouch for a palaeontologist’s analysis of fossils within them — especially if the work has been carried out in labs on different continents.
The fact that simple trust may no longer suffice is a sad reflection on recent scientific history, but anything that supports public confidence in research has to be welcomed, provided that its burden is not too great. What follows is a proposal in that direction, on which we invite readers’ comments.
We suggest that journals should require that every manuscript has at least one author per collaborating research group who will go on record in a way that collectively vouches for the paper’s standards. Each would sign a statement with reference to Nature’s publication policies as follows:
“I have ensured that every author in my research group has seen and approved this manuscript. The data that are presented in the figures and tables were reviewed in raw form, the analysis and statistics applied are appropriate and the figures are accurate representations of the data. Any manipulations of images conform to Nature’s guidelines. All journal policies on materials and data sharing, ethical treatment of research subjects, conflicts of interest, biosecurity etc. have been adhered to. I have confidence that all of the conclusions presented are based on accurate extrapolations from the data collected for this study and that my colleagues listed as co-authors have contributed and deserve the designation ‘author’.”
Principal investigators traditionally bask in the glory of a well-received paper. We are proposing now that they willingly open themselves to sanctions that could be brought to bear should the paper turn out to have major problems.
Misconduct investigators go out of their way to spare anyone apart from the direct perpetrators, but they have indicated concerns over the degree of oversight within collaborations. If the damage to reputations were more widespread in the event of fraud, researchers would be even more fastidious about the data emanating from their labs and the due diligence they would impose. The chances of major frauds, with their disproportionate impact on the reputation of science as a whole, would be diminished.
We invite comments from readers on this editorial.
(The Nature journals' current policies can be seen at Nature's Guide to Authors and at the Author and Reviewers' website.)

Posted by Maxine Clarke on October 31, 2007
Categories: Authorship, Ethics, Policies | Permalink | Comments (24)

Dr Robin Rose writes: Recently, the scientific community was presented with a paper containing the names of no fewer than 21 authors in Nature. The race for recognition in certain areas of study appears to have many scientists battling for authorships on as many papers as will accept them. Any number of journals seem to find this acceptable. Thinking back through my long career in science I cannot recall ever seeing an article or "letter," in this case, with so many authors: 1/21 would suggest an average 4.76% contribution, with some contributing more and some less (!). While collaboration is often praiseworthy, I found myself asking more than a few questions:

(1) How does a paper with so many authors actually get written, accepted for review, and then revised? What does author mean in such a case?
(2) How does such a paper 'count' in terms of value in academic promotion and tenure? Did 20+ people have the same idea at the same time?
(3) What level of credit does each author take when such a paper is part of a resumé or when citation statistics are considered?
(4) After the first three to five authors, how is the contribution of the rest gauged?
(5) Does the author order have some significance when there are 20+?
(6) Is research more credible with 20+ authors? Should journals allow for 30+ authors?
(7) Are 20+ authors meant as some sort of statement, whether scientific, political or scientifically political?
(8) Were authors added as a way to strengthen the conclusions, but also implying that a few did most of the work, more did a bit of the work, and the rest did very little?
(9) Are the authors part of a collective group? Why not use the group name as the author?
(10) Are we witnessing "author inflation?"

Such questions are important for scientists, journal editors, and their supervisors to sort out. Maybe papers with high author counts are intended to display some harmony that exists in the international academic and research community. Maybe we need to stop using the vague "et al" and go to "first author name plus 20" (the specific number of co-authors) so as to better clarify multiple contributions. There may be more issues, questions, and possibilities but I'll leave those to countless other authors.

Dr Robin Rose, Research Cooperative College of Forestry, Oregon State University.

Maxine Clarke, on behalf of the Nature journals, adds: we welcome responses (in the comments section below) to Dr Rose's points. Our authorship policies do not specify a particular order or maximum number of authors, but we do strongly encourage authors to include a statement in the end notes to specify the actual contribution of each coauthor to the completed work.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on August 21, 2007
Categories: Authorship, Policies | Permalink | Comments (9)