I'm just back from our company's annual briefing & pep rally, where our efforts at blogging, here and over at Free Association, were honorably mentioned. I had been entirely unaware, and was quite astonished to hear, that the top brass - NPG Managing Director Annette Thomas! - regularly read the blog including your comments via RSS feed. Jeez... my scare of the week!
Silliness aside, this is really a very very good thing. Our voices and yours are being heard. Your numerous comments on "DBPR" are making an impression. Who knows, there might be some movement on this issue. If there's any other burning issue you think we should be discussing here, send us an email. The email address is above, slightly camouflaged to discourage the spammers.
In our current issue, we've dedicated the editorial to introducing the blog to our wider readership, in yet another effort to increase participation. Our colleagues at Nature Cell Biology also mull the pros and cons of blogging in their current editorial. They seem reluctant about taking the plunge at this time, because they see us and Free Association having a slow start. I think they are correct in attributing this to scientists' general lack of time, information overload, and reluctance to get involved in public discussions. But of course any new publishing venture needs some initial investment followed by patient courting of the audience, and we remain optimistic that the neuroscience community will adopt Action Potential as a useful forum for feedback and discussion.
You may have noticed that we haven't put any new papers online this week. Enjoy the little breather - there'll be a lot of very fine papers coming over the next two Sundays.
