Guest blog by Jenefer Thoroughgood, Head of Communities, Nature Publishing Group

BioPharma Dealmakers brings together life sciences companies and individuals looking to identify and attract partners and dealmaking opportunities. With a quarterly magazine that is distributed in Nature Biotechnology and Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, BioPharma Dealmakers provides insights into dealmaking trends and profiles from companies looking to partner – showcasing their pipeline products, technologies, therapeutic focus and partnering strategies.

On November 30, 2015 BioPharma Dealmakers launched its new website, which adds to these insights and profiles with further special features and regular deal updates. What’s more, it provides tools for networking and sharing knowledge, as well as the opportunity for companies to further showcase their expertise through a range of sponsorship opportunities.

Companies and individuals are actively encouraged to engage in networking and dialogue on the BioPharma Dealmakers website, by commenting on, sharing and upvoting content, messaging each other and following the companies profiled.

The website is designed to  support biopharma companies in the crucial and competitive world of dealmaking by providing a platform to help them to identify, research and connect with potential partners. For anyone interested in this area, the website should become a valuable community of like-minded peers and a go-to site for seeking new partners and innovations.

BioPharma Dealmakers’ new site is hosted by Software as a Service company Zapnito, with whom Nature Publishing Group earlier this year formed a collaborative partnership to build online expert communities.

Ruth Wilson, Head of Publishing for BioPharma Dealmakers and Matt Kay, Product Manager, have worked with Zapnito over recent weeks to develop the website to meet the requirements of its customers in the life sciences dealmaking arena.

“We’re aware that biopharma companies looking to make deals put a lot of resource and effort into identifying and researching partners, strengthening their own reputation and status, and furthering their understanding of dealmaking trends and activity. We wanted to support our customers in all these activities, and saw that the tools offered by Zapnito had the potential to support us in this endeavour,” said Ruth.

Now featuring MedTech Dealmakers, with special features on the medtech dealmaking landscape and profiles from innovative companies seeking partners, BioPharma Dealmakers is set to become the destination for life sciences companies and partnering professionals looking to make connections and get the latest on their industry.

Raveena Bhambra, Editor of BioPharma Dealmakers, said “we are really excited by the potential of the new BioPharma Dealmakers service to facilitate the partnering activity that drives global drug development. There are not many online partnering resources around of this kind so we encourage anyone with an interest in this space to sign up and  engage in this new partnering community.”

Guest blog by  Liesbeth Venema

What motivates scientists to devote their lives to the pursuit of scientific discovery? It must be, at least partly, the hope of finding true beauty. After all, what can be more beautiful than opening up a new window on the world or uncovering a hidden layer of complexity in the laws of nature?

Plenty of beautiful scientific experiments have delighted scientists and non-scientists alike over the centuries. Light, in

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all its colours and manifestations, has played a starring role. The intricate nature of light has been a wonder in itself: imagine the surprise when it was first discovered that white light can be unfolded into all the colours of the rainbow. And the many ways in which light provides us with useful tools and applications, multiplied with the advent of lasers, is unparalleled.

The year 2015 was chosen by UNESCO to be the International Year of Light (link: https://www.light2015.org/Home.html) and we endeavoured to find out which 10 experiments with light are thought of as the most beautiful of them all. We opened a poll from 17 February to 17 April, where anyone could choose up to three of their favourite experiments with light from a candidate list of about 30. Brief introductions of all experiments were posted weekly here at nature.com blogs.

Below are the results (click on the individual experiments to read the blog posts where they are introduced) and there is a clear winner chosen by 374 voters.

Young’s double slit, which confirmed the wave character of light, is the fairest of them all. A close second is Newton’s prism, which first revealed the colourful splendour of light. In third place is the laser, the ubiquitous invention that has revolutionized so many technologies.

Does this exercise bring us closer to defining beauty in science?

Perhaps a little. Clearly, one hallmark of a beautiful experiment is the element of surprise, the kind that reveals a new perspective on the world and opens a new direction in scientific enquiry. A prime example is number 5, van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope. “It enabled us to see beautiful small worlds, which we didn’t even know existed”, one of our voters commented. And another “The first visual confirmation of a world within our world, paving the way for an understanding of the world of disease and nature.”

Beauty can also be found in the sheer inventiveness of the human mind. Eratosthenes’ experiment is an example of such intellectual prowess. As summed up by one of our voters “Given the era in which this experiment was performed, I would say the originality and boldness of Eratosthenes, together with his capacity to guess an experimental evidence (completely out of the date of his time) are totally remarkable and admirable”.

The invention of the laser, which was the result of hard work and clever engineering, is another example “A moment of magic, even if it was expected at the time. It went on to transform the way we live.”

Another category is the eye-opening insight, the kind that seems obvious in hindsight but does no less than change our view of the world: the finding that the Universe is expanding from Doppler shifts in light emitted by retreating stars, was such an awe-inspiring discovery. “The Universe is not static. It is ever expanding into the unknown; much like human knowledge and science”, one of our voters wrote philosophically.

Young’s double slit, from 1801, is the number 1 most beautiful experiment. With a simple piece of equipment — a thin plate with two closely spaced slits — it produces ripple-like patterns of light, crucially confirming that light behaves as a wave, which was in doubt at the time. At first sight it is mainly that, a clean and crisp confirmation of a theory. “Elegant, informative and simple.  Everything an experiment should be”, as one voter said.

But another wrote “It gave an answer (at least for some time) to one of the most interesting debates in physics history”.  Indeed, the outcome of the Young’s experiment was not the whole story, and later experiments showed that light can also behave as a particle; this dual nature of light was an important theme in the development of quantum mechanics.

Young’s double slit has played an enduring part in scientific experiments and later on was used to produce wave-like patterns even for individual light particles, or photons, as well as for other particles such as electrons and more recently even for molecules. It reveals a deep property of both light and matter: they are all both particle and wave. How can this be?

And perhaps that is the essence of beauty in science: a striking, deceptively simple observation that contains at its heart a mystery. One that promises a new world of possibilities, waiting to be discovered with the next milestone, beautiful experiment.

Top 10 Beautiful Experiments:

1 Young’s double slit experiment with light (1801)

2 Newton’s prism, splitting the rainbow (1665)                                                                       

3 Demonstration of the laser by Maiman (1960)                                                                     

4 Eratosthenes’ calculation of the Earth’s circumference, using a tower’s shadow (240 BC)

5 Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope, making micro-organisms visible (1670)       

6 Hubble’s discovery of an expanding universe from Doppler shift (1929)                              

7 Roentgen’s first X-ray image (1895)                                                                            

8 Michelson-Morley interferometer experiment to detect motion relative to the ether (1887) 

9 Bell test experiments with photons (1972)       

10 General relativity put to the test: measuring light bending during a solar eclipse (1919)

Guest post by Nandita Quaderi, PhD, Publishing Director, Nature Publishing Group/Palgrave Macmillan

There is a post on the Scholarly Kitchen blog this week that asks: “how can we improve the article review and submission process?”.  For all of us involved in scientific and scholarly publishing, it has long been accepted that peer review is necessary and beneficial in ensuring the quality of scientific communication. But it is also seen by many as an imperfect system: less efficient than it should be and sometimes frustratingly slow.

In a 2014 survey of over 30,000 NPG researchers, authors told us that they want us to innovate when it comes to peer review:

• 70% authors are frustrated with the time peer-review takes
• 77% think traditional peer review could be made more efficient
• 67% think publishers should experiment with alternative peer-review methods

NPG is first and foremost here to serve scientists. As scientists our method is to run experiments, measure the results, learn and adapt. Testing and evolving the peer review process is something we’ve embraced over many years at NPG. Recently, our innovations have included offering double blind peer review (now available across Nature and the Nature sister journals following a successful trial), and an open peer review trial for monographs last year. We’re committed to exploring, learning, and better understanding the needs and choices of our authors.

In that spirit, this week we launched a small-scale opt-in trial of a faster peer review service for Scientific Reports. Authors submitting a manuscript to Scientific Reports can choose a fast-track peer-review service at an additional cost. Authors who opt-in to fast-track will receive an editorial decision (accept, reject or revise) with peer-review comments within three weeks of their manuscript being submitted and passing initial quality checks.

The fast-track service is being provided in partnership with a third party, Research Square, using their Rubriq peer-review system, which incentivises its reviewers with a fee per review. The trial is currently restricted to biology manuscripts, which is an area that Rubriq has a long-established reputation of supporting with its peer review service. Editorial decisions, based on these peer review reports, reside with Scientific Reports in-house editors. We’ve chosen Research Square as our partner on this trial because we have worked with them for a number of years in other parts of our business and because we recently conducted a successful private parallel run of peer-review outputs comparing Rubriq with Scientific Reports.  Importantly we share a common goal of putting researchers at the heart of what we do, and are both continually experimenting with different innovations in the publishing process.

Needless to say, an author choosing the fast-track option is only benefiting from a quicker decision. The introduction of this service has no bearing on our editorial decision process – whether we accept, reject or request revisions – and we have worked closely with Research Square to be confident that their reviewer reports are as rigorous as we would expect from our own Scientific Reports reviewers. This is an opt-in small scale pilot for a limited period of time, and will not affect the overall service we provide to authors who don’t choose the service. Our aim is to experiment with different options to deliver author choice.

We know with any innovation that there will be as many challenges as opportunities. Experimentation is key if we are to improve scholarly communications and support the researcher community, be they authors, reviewers, editorial board members or readers.  We hope this trial will provide useful feedback, in whatever form it takes, and will share what we’ve learnt in the coming weeks.

Sarah’s Synopsis – The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine’s Deepest Mystery by George Johnson

Cancer is a disease that inspires dread in many people. Most of us have had some experience of it or, at the very least, have read one of the myriad articles in the press about the latest cause or cure. George Johnson’s The Cancer Chronicles cuts through all of the noise and confusion, and presents a fascinating, often frightening, but ultimately empowering, account of the history of cancer and the human quest to understand it.

The book begins millions of years ago, in the late Jurassic, when cancer stalked the dinosaurs. Today, the only remnants of these ancient battles are the scars and bone tumours on their fossilised remains. Johnson brings these battles to life with stories such as that of a nine metre Gorgosaurus with what appears to be a bone tumour lodged in its brain. The tumour is in an area normally associated with motor control and researchers have suggested that the battered condition of its skeleton may be a result of the location of the tumour, which caused the dinosaur to suffer numerous falls. A cancer so old, which rendered a huge carnivore helpless, makes it clear that this disease is not just a human condition. In fact, it becomes apparent that all kinds of dinosaurs were afflicted by cancer and that it affects all extant animals too; domesticated animals more than their wild counterparts, and humans most of all.

In terms of what causes cancer, Johnson describes the major contributors – smoking, obesity and ageing – those with a large enough effect (but still a very small one) to consider doing something about. He also highlights the existence of countless other environmental factors and various genetic weaknesses and strengths that can influence an individual’s likelihood of developing cancer. Factors like sunlight exposure and consumption of red meat, he notes, you can try to account for, but when it comes to radon gas and all the other invisible carcinogens, who knows when or how much a person is exposed to in a lifetime? According to The Cancer Chronicles, there are approximately 10 trillion cells in the human body, almost 4 million of which are dividing every second, and all it takes is one “isolated act of betrayal”, one cell going rogue, to cause cancer. As Johnson puts it “you could live your life with a calculator”.

The deeper I delved into The Cancer Chronicles the more amazed I became at the vast history and breadth of this disease, which is both a fundamental consequence of being a multicellular organism and also the beginning of something almost alien. Just as you feel like you might get lost in the enormity of it all, you are brought back to Earth by the story of Nancy, Johnson’s wife, and her diagnosis and personal struggle with the disease. Her story, which spurred Johnson’s quest to understand cancer, weaves in and out of the book and serves to illustrate the effect of the disease on people and their loved ones. The helplessness and the waiting, along with the suffering endured while receiving treatment and the hope that it will work, are universal consequences of the human experience of cancer and the book would be incomplete without featuring them.

I came away from reading The Cancer Chronicles with a feeling that we are not as helpless in the face of cancer as I thought and that, despite its relentless march through history, we are, for the first time, getting to a point where we can do something to manage it. Like the tortoise, it seems that our slow steady progress will get us there eventually. In the meantime, the best we can do is try not to smoke, avoid becoming obese and enjoy life.

Sarah Lahert is a press officer with Nature Publishing Group and is the most recent addition to the press team, having moved to the UK from Ireland earlier this year. In her previous life she worked for a corporate biotechnology company and briefly in the Irish senate. Aside from science, she is interested in politics and foreign affairs, and also likes to paint when the mood takes her.

Neda’s Notes – Seven Elements that have Changed the World by John Browne

There are works of non-fiction that focus solely on the subject matter and then there are works of non-fiction that are just as much about the author’s views as about the topic at hand.  Seven Elements that have Changed the World falls squarely in the latter category.

I have learned much about John Browne (Lord Browne of Madingley), his role as the former chief executive of BP (and the conversations he was part of while there), what he likes to collect (gold relics from South America and rare books from around the world), his choice of vacation activities (notably a gondola ride in the canals of Venice and a bike ride in New York City), and the many prominent people he has had the pleasure of meeting for business purposes (Tony Blaire and Hugo Chavez, to name just two).  And in between these tales of lifelong adventures, I also learned a few things about the historic (and personal) significance of iron, carbon, gold, silver, uranium, titanium, and silicon.

Browne is undoubtedly a curious person who throughout his life has utilized his resources and networks to broaden his understanding of topics ranging from art to economics.  There is palatable zest in his scholarly attempts of writing about life-long passions, which include U.S. iron magnates at the turn of the 20^th century, photography and silver-coated plates used in its early format, and the more current sociopolitical issues of uranium. The blatant (and unapologetic) personal involvement in each chapter is just as common a theme as the elements that are depicted. As such, a better title for the book might have been, My Seven Favorite Elements.

The best example of this is the chapter on the element carbon, almost twice as long as the chapters on any of the other elements, and basically a treatise on oil and natural gas.  Browne affirms that, “carbon’s story begins millennia before we began to use oil on an industrial scale,” but then spends very little time on this history and its significance.  In fact, most of the chapter is peppered with his experiences in the oil industry starting in the 1950s, more specifically what he saw and learned, and the decisions he was part of since joining BP in 1966.  Though it is interesting to read the thoughts of an expert on the changing oil industry (e.g. fracking and climate change), I am not convinced he looked at the broad history and uses of carbon.

According to Browne, there are only seven elements in this book because these are the only ones to have “powerfully changed the course of human history.” I was hesitant to accept this claim before reading the book and am still not convinced having read what he has to say about each of these elements.  For instance, it seems odd not to include nitrogen, which has had a critical role in medicine and agriculture, but to include titanium because of its limited role in WWII warfare.  Some level of subjectivity is reasonable (and needed) when deciding how to approach the multitude of possible elements, but the definitiveness with which Browne states that these are the only ones that changed history was never adequately proven in the 250-page book, which is as much (if not more) an autobiography as a science book.

Neda Afsarmanesh is Senior Press Officer at Nature Publishing Group, working in the New York City office.

Lisa’s Literature Lowdown – The Perfect Theory by Pedro G. Ferreira

Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published nearly 100 years ago, explains the relationship between gravity, space and time. The theory provides “the key to understanding the history of the universe, origin of time, and the evolution of all the stars and galaxies in the cosmos,” according to Pedro G. Ferreira. His book, The Perfect Theory, tells the tale of how the theory was questioned, tested, modified and supported by a range of scientists. It is a book with gravity that pulls you in, describing what the theory has taught us so far, and what we may learn from it in the future.

Out of the sciences, physics is furthest from my comfort zone, but during my time in the Nature press office I have read and written about many weird, wonderful and complex physics papers. I’ve gained a wealth of knowledge and interest in the subject, thanks in part to the helpful Nature editors that have guided me through the trickier topics. The Perfect Theory helps to tie up some of the tougher subject matter by detailing how the theory has influenced the fields of astrophysics and quantum physics, among others.  Just one chapter is dedicated to describing how Einstein developed his general theory of relativity and the challenges he faced; the rest of the book looks at what happened next and describes the exciting discoveries that have shaped our understanding of the universe.

On the surface, The Perfect Theory is not a light read. It covers complex material, and jumps back and forth in time as it looks at the different way in which the theory was explored by a range of A-list physicists — from Arthur Eddington, one of the first scientists to experimentally confirm the predictions made by Einstein, to Stephen Hawking, who used the theory to make predictions about the properties of black holes. However, Ferreira manages to pull together each of the threads into an engaging read that carefully describes the new insights provided by the different ways in which the theory has been probed. He also paints a detailed picture of the various characters that have worked on the theory, giving the story real personality.

Ferreira concludes that the theory of general relativity is at the heart of 21st Century physics and astronomy, guiding the ongoing search for gravitational waves, efforts to build a telescope that can directly observe a black hole, and other projects that continue to probe the theory and learn what else it might tell us about the universe. Thus, The Perfect Theory provides more than just a history of general relativity and what it has taught us so far, as it also hints towards what the theory still has to offer.
About Lisa Boucher
Lisa Boucher has been a Press Officer at Nature for nearly four years, having previously dabbled in the art of editing for the clinical Nature Reviews titles.