Over the next week or so here on Of Schemes and Memes we’re introducing you to all the blogs on the new nature.com blogs site. We started off with the News blog, followed by the Spoonful of Medicine, from Nature Medicine and the Sceptical Chymist from Nature Chemistry. Now we hear from the team at Nature Protocols who present the renamed Stepwise blog…

Stepwise

Firstly:  Welcome to Stepwise, an essential stop on your journey to finding and sharing great scientific protocols! Around the table on our end are:  Chris Surridge (The Chief), Katharine Barnes, Dot Clyde, Hannah Clarke and Bronwen Dekker, the editors from Nature Protocols and the guardians of the Protocol Exchange.
The first blog post for the Nature Protocols blog was in May 2010, and asked the very important question: What should we call our blog? While we all agreed that out blog should have an outstanding name, we were not able to get terribly much further than “Nature Protocols Blog” until Dot looked up from her computer in a commissioning meeting and said: *Stepwise*!

We will continue to share news, helpful hints on how to use our site, comments about our protocols, or give updates from conferences.
These are handily organised into the following categories:
– Hints and Wrinkles
– News and Updates
– Spotlights
– There and Back Again

Here are some example posts that highlight what we are all about:
Recipes for Research
The arrival of guidelines for reporting experiments
Focusing on stem cells
Nature Protocols Roundup
Notes from the 3rd EMBO meeting, Vienna
Update on inserting images into Exchange Protocols

We have quite an active twitter account for up-to-the-minute news about published protocols, and other things we happen to find interesting. Follow us  at: @NatureProtocols

If you would like to contact us you can also email: protocols@nature.com:protocols@nature.com.