Nascent

NatureJobs.com, our online scientific careers service, got a bit of a facelift last week, and very nice it looks too.

But the biggest change wasn't aesthetic, it was on the money side of the operation: NatureJobs is now offering free postings for basic online science job ads, making it the first specialist site to do this. If you want something extra, like for your ad to appear in the print edition of a Nature journal, then you still need to pay, which seems fair enough to me. For anyone who wants the full story, the press release is here: PDF, 24k.

In a nutshell, NatureJobs.com has switched from being a paid-only service to using a 'freemium' business model. As pointed out by several web-savvy business people (including Fred Wilson, a VC and coiner of the term 'freemium'), this approach is much more in line with the general economics of the web (which entail a shift from variable to fixed costs, lower customer acquisition costs, and so on).

More important from the point of view of scientists, we should start to see a lot more open positions appearing in the NatureJobs database. In fact, if scientific recruiters are as rational as they ought to be, all science jobs should eventually be posted there. I mean, if it's free, why wouldn't you?

Posted by Timo Hannay at 04:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What do you get if you cross the US National Cancer Institute with the Nature Web Publishing Group? Not a punch line (or at least one that I'm capable of coming up with), but the Pathway Interaction Database.

It's a high quality (and growing) collection of information about molecular interactions that occur in human cellular signaling pathways. All the data is pulled together by Nature editors and rigorously peer-reviewed, and Carl Schaefer (our collaborator at the NCI) has done a fantastic job building the bioinformatics infrastructure and data analysis tools.

We've tried to make the browse & visualization features intuitive enough for research biologists who favor digestible summary diagrams of the type often found in journals and textbooks, and we also have some nifty tools to let bioinformaticians and other technophiles carry out pretty complex queries.

Take a look and please help spread the word.

Posted by Matt Day at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is hot off the press: One hundred and fourteen (count 'em) Nobel Laureates have weighed in on the case the Tripoli Six with an open letter to Colonel Gaddafi.

I wrote about this case here just over a month ago, after Nature had published a news article and a strongly worded editorial, and while the reporter responsible, Declan Butler, was recruiting scientific bloggers to the cause. Well over 300 blog posts have sprung up since then, reflecting widespread outrage. Declan has also followed up with further articles and a radio interview. And The Times, The Washington Post and Condi Rice have also voiced their support. But there isn't much time left: the next (and probably final) court session takes place this Saturday, 4 November.

You can read more in the Nature Web Focus, and on Declan's blog and resource page, or join the conversation on the Nature Newsblog. Fantastic journalism, and a fantastic demonstration of the power of the internet to bring people together for a cause.

(As it happens, this week's Nature is a special issue on Islam and science. Well worth checking out too.)

Posted by Timo Hannay at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)