For those of you who may have missed it, on April 30th Nature and the Nature research journals — including Nature Methods — announced a change in policy regarding the duties of lead authors. The changes are explained in a Nature editorial and have been implemented in our Guide to Authors. A detailed explanation of the Nature journals' new authorship policy can be found here.

These changes are meant to clarify the responsibilities of our authors to help ensure that the results and conclusions in Nature journal papers accurately reflect the original data, that this data is preserved, and that appropriate actions are taken to ensure the availability of materials — including algorithms — needed to replicate the work.

We will also be requiring that authors provide statements of authors' contributions in Nature Methods papers submitted after April 30. Since Nature Methods began asking for this in early 2007 the number of authors providing this statement has already increased from 50% in May 2007 to 80% in May 2009 so we hope that making this a requirement won't be problematic.

We realize that these changes could be seen as an added burden on authors but we don't believe the expectations exceed what most readers expect of work published in Nature Methods or the other Nature journals and we hope our authors agree.

Posted by Daniel Evanko at 08:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Many of our readers have no doubt noticed a pronounced change in the Methods section of Nature Methods papers published online over the past several weeks. Brief Communications now have a Methods section for the first time ever and in manuscript types that already had a Methods section, the section has been expanded and moved to the end of the paper.

These changes are described in detail in an Editorial accompanying the May issue of the journal. The new design is similar to what Nature implemented in 2007 and we hope our authors and readers appreciate the greatly expanded space this provides for methodological details. We are relieved that we will no longer have to relegate important methodological details to Supplementary Information and we expect our authors will appreciate being able to include more citations in their papers.

A potential downside of this change is that the print and online versions of papers have quite different levels of methodological detail. What do you think? Those of you who are online readers may not have very strong opinions on this, but what about our print readers? If anyone who regularly receives a print copy of the journal is reading this, we would like your feedback as well.

Posted by Daniel Evanko at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Experimental comparisons of methods, technology platforms or reagents are time-consuming and expensive, but hugely beneficial. An Editorial in the April issue of Nature Methods illustrates how such comparisons have been very useful for scientists in various research disciplines. Nature Methods has now adopted an article format called ‘Analysis’ to accommodate publication of such comparative analyses. Broad guidelines of what the editors will be looking for are provided in the April Editorial.

Posted by Veronique Kiermer at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Don’t be mistaken, Nature Methods’ material sharing policy includes the requirement to make custom-developed software available upon publication. But there are several ways of making software available. We examine the various degrees of disclosure and the choice of formats and try to clarify our position. Let us know if we are heading in the right direction!

Posted by Veronique Kiermer at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)