Hello. I’m the Chief Editor of Nature Medicine and also get to write on our blog. As Charlotte and Apoorva do such a great job writing about science and about politics, I will write mostly about the journal itself and about the editorial world—the kind of things that scientists like to ask journal editors when we visit labs or go to meetings.

To kick things off, I thought I’d write about Web 2.0 and scientific publishing. There is a lot of interest about the impact that a second-generation Internet that emphasizes collaboration and sharing among users may have on scientific journals. We even wrote an editorial about this topic.

One idea is that the community will increasingly do without high-profile journals to decide what an important paper is and what it is not. If many scientists get together to discuss papers in social-networking sites, they may provide visibility to papers published in obscure journals and deprecate articles from more visible titles.

If this becomes the case, and if high-profile journals make enough editorial mistakes while selecting the papers we publish, then the value of those publications will indeed go down. If this happens, then it won’t matter whether you publish in Nature Medicine or in a very specialized journal—if your paper is good, the community will appreciate it.

But wait a minute. First, there are a lot of “if”s in the previous two paragraphs. A lot of events—some more likely than others—need to happen for this scenario to come true. Second, what about the people making decisions about your tenure, about offering you a postdoc position or your first academic job, or about giving you money for your research? Will they be ready to stop looking at the name and impact factor of the journals where you have published and let social-networking sites supply the filtering service that journals currently provide? It’s conceivable, but the fact remains that we don’t really know what the second-generation internet will do to scientific publishing.

What’s your take on this matter? Do you really imagine a time when publishing in Nature or Science will stop being as meaningful as it is now? Or perhaps this question is misplaced and the impact of Web 2.0 on journals will take a totally different form. What kind of Web 2.0–driven changes do you think we need to worry about?

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Happy new year, everyone!

Our former intern, Emily Waltz, alerted me to Edge.org, where 160 scientists and thinkers -- including Nature's own news & features editor Oliver Morton -- have answered the question, "What are you optimistic about?" You'd think that a bunch of scientists would have little to say that's uplifting -- especially in areas such as, say, climate change, cancer or population growth -- and a few live up to that expectation, but some of the answers are downright upbeat.

Here's a small sampling:

"I am optimistic that the ascendance of open access postings of articles to the internet will transform scientific and medical publishing." -- Beatrice Golomb, professor of medicine, University of California San Diego

"I am bullish about the mind's ability to unravel the beliefs contained within it—including beliefs about its own nature." -- Mahzarin Banaji, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Harvard University

"I'm optimistic about the prospects for science to become a much more broadly participatory activity rather than today's largely spectator sport." Neil Gershenfeld, MIT

"The trends in China and India and elsewhere toward educating literally millions of people with scientific, engineering and technical degrees is tremendously positive." -- Nathan Myrhvold, CEO of Intellectual Ventures

"I am optimistic about humanity's coming enlightenment." -- Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia

But would it really be a group of scientists if at least one didn't say something along these lines?

"In short, we should neither be too despondent nor too elated at the trajectory of current events." -- Robert Trivers, evolutionary biologist, Rutgers University.

So tell us -- what are you most optimistic about???

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Liquid condom? Sounds kinky, but it could actually be a clever and much-needed health tool. Scientists have come up with a condom that forms a gel-like coating in the acidic vagina. When it comes into contact with the alkaline pH of semen, it turns into liquid, releasing an antiviral drug against HIV.

This particular product, described in December's Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, is still years from clinical use, but the Chinese are one step ahead. They've got something called the "Nanometer-silver Cryptomorphic Condom" -- a real mood-killer, that name -- which is a spray foam that forms a thin membrane in the vagina.

For the skeptical, there are also several products in the pipeline that would replace condoms. Called microbicides, they're gels or creams that women could use to protect themselves from HIV, in most cases without the knowledge of their partner. There are 16 of these in trials and results on 5 of them are expected next year.

It's becoming increasingly obvious that to fight AIDS, we'll have to come up with ways to protect women -- particularly those who don't have much choice about using condoms, whether it is because they are sex workers at the mercy of a john, or housewives at the whim of their husbands. The more options we can give them to protect themselves, the better.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 04:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)