The editors and publishers of Nature seek the opinion of scientists at a series of focus groups this October. The focus groups will be held in San Francisco, Washington DC, Glasgow, Manchester, Oxford, Geneva and Munich. Nature is seeking 20 people in each city. You need not be a regular reader of the journal, or to have published in it.

To be eligible, you must be aged between 25 and 65 and work in the sciences: in academia, a commercial company, NGO, governmental organization or other setting. We are seeking both working scientists and decision-makers within companies/organizations rooted in science.

Participants will receive a token £75/$150 and refreshments in return for three hours of your time.

To register your interest, please complete this online form as soon as you read this post – and before 4 October.

There are additional selection criteria for these focus groups. Regretfully, we can only reply to those chosen to take part.

A happy Christmas, new year and holiday season to all readers. This blog will resume posting on Friday 2 January 2009.

In the meantime, I recommend the article ‘Burnout’, by Frank Gannon, published in the December issue of EMBO Reports (9, 1157; 2008). From the article:

Even when we do step out of our professional world, we do not always allow our minds to follow. As we sit in the theatre, are we secretly churning over a work-related problem at the back of our heads? Similarly, are we fully taking part in family activities or are we thinking in parallel about the next grant proposal or presentation? An honest answer would be that sometimes we fail to close our minds to work when we leave the building. Conversely, some of our brightest insights can come while stuck in traffic, walking the dog or sitting through a boring theatrical performance. But it does mean that we risk our work consuming our lives.

…

It is important to establish a work–life balance that allows us to pursue other interests and activities, and to spend time with our families. If nothing else helps, we might seriously consider changing jobs—a new start can be truly reinvigorating as it removes one from the inevitability of tomorrow, colleagues who have only predictable advice to offer, the chaos of unread papers, un-filed documents and un-done tasks that have been piling up. Of course, changing jobs is a rather drastic solution and not always possible or desired. But, a sabbatical can often achieve the same goal and allow us to return fresh to a job we still want to love. What we should avoid, however, is analysing our situation and continuing down the same track, even if we recognize ourselves to be burnt out.

Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:

Planet Nature

Nature.com’s science blogs index and tracker

Nature Network’s many blogs and forums

Science Online FriendFeed room.

Seymour Benzer, one of the giants of twentieth-century biology, died on 30 November 2007. Benzer, who maintained an active laboratory until the time of his death, was a unique figure who made seminal contributions to physics, molecular biology and behavioural genetics. See: Obituary: Seymour Benzer (1921-2007) by David Anderson with Sydney Brenner (Nature 451, 139; 2008).

“Benzer’s style was to pioneer a new area, and then to move on to something new once the hordes had rushed in. As he said: “I like to take things that are fuzzy, and turn them into something tangible.” ……..by a simple argument, he deduced that the minimum unit of mutation is probably a single base pair of DNA. This idea was fundamental to connecting the structure of DNA to the reality of genetics. And, together with Fred Sanger’s discovery that proteins are composed of precise sequences of amino acids, this work laid the foundations of the new science of molecular biology.

Most scientists would have been content to continue in this exciting field, but Benzer became characteristically restless. For him, once it became obvious how a problem could be solved, it was time to move on to another."

Will you be working on Christmas Day? Richard J. Ladle et al. in Nature‘s Correspondence page this week (450, 1156; 2007) report evidence that increasing numbers of scientists are swapping party hats for mouse mats during the festive season. Take a look at their suitably decorative evidence, and I urge you to take their advice.

Earlier this year, I was asked by a scientist blogger, Attila Csordas, “what is your science blogging style?”. Here is my answer, which was posted at Partial Immortalization during November:

“My professional blogs (Nautilus, Peer to Peer and From the Blogosphere) are addressed to a particular group of people: scientists who read, review and publish, or would like to publish, in our journals. Therefore, the style I try to achieve is helpful, informative and stimulating, yet not didactic or dull. I aim to highlight the benefits of publishing at Nature Publishing Group and provide assistance to those wishing to do so, in a way that is not too directly promotional, but which is constructive to authors and interesting to them and other readers, as well as encouraging their feedback. Therefore I write about news concerning journal policies and format, as well as announcements of new journals, projects, conferences and online tools of interest to authors and reviewers. I also highlight when journal content is free for some reason, because this means that the authors of those articles are achieving greater “reach” for their articles (as well as making it possible for more people to read them, by my announcement). I also highlight news from the wider world of science communication, for example about quality indicators (citations tools and impact factors, for example), ethics, peer-review and so on, in the hope of stimulating community discussion of these issues, as this can help us decide on our journals’ evolution. Finally, I blog to provide an approachable forum for potential authors to ask questions about our publication policies, and to have them answered quickly in a way that can also benefit others, as they can see the responses."

A happy Christmas, New Year and holiday to all readers of Nautilus. I will be back in the new year. In the meantime, if you wish to read and discuss stimulating articles with a scientific accent during this holiday season, please visit Nature‘s News website, and for general scientific-related interactions and chat, you will find much to interest you at Nature Network’s many forums and groups.

The Washington, DC, office of Nature will be closed the week of 18 June for renovations. We expect to re-open on Monday 25 June and be back to full operations on Tuesday 26 June.

All staff will be working at home for the week, except for the office manager Katie McGoldrick, who will be answering the main phone line and email. Staff will provide contact details by voicemail or forward calls to their home or cell numbers. They will be responding to email. But please bear in mind things will be running a bit more slowly than usual.

Nature Publishing Group has this week launched a website dedicated to authors and peer-reviwers. Authors & Referees @ npg (https://www.nature.com/authors) provides links to and information about the Nature journals’ publication policies for primary research papers; author and referee services; and author benefits. We also provide feedback links so potential authors, peer-reviewers, scientists and other readers can ask questions about these topics. This blog (Peer to Peer) and our authors’ blog (Nautilus) are integrated into the site.

Find out more about the site here or via the links in the vertical column to the left of this page. We hope to be hearing from you about what you’d like us to include in this site, and receiving your questions and comments about our policies, services and benefits for authors and reviwers.

(This post has also been published on the Nautilus blog.)

Peer-to-Peer and Nautilus have received their first welcome to the scientific blogosphere from outside the Nature Publishing Group. At Blog Around the Clock, Coturnix, er, welcomes us here. Lukman has added a comment: “Thanks for this great info. Your blog is very informative for science development for ordinary people like us.”

In an earlier post, Coturnix writes about the upcoming 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging conference, part of the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. From the society’s website: “Popular political and social commentary blogs are making the news, but is there more out there than chatty gossip and collections of links? How about some science? Can this trendy technology be useful for scientists? Come to the Media Workshop and find out ….about how blogging works, setting one up, finding things to write about, and using the medium for your classes, for research, or for educating the public.”

Correction: The session on science blogging at SCIB is on January 4th in Phoenix, AZ, while the 1.5-day Science Blogging Conference is on January 20th in Chapel Hill, NC. (Thanks to Coturnix for pointing this out.)

Welcome to Nature Publishing Group’s new-look peer-review blog. In the summer of 2006, the journal Nature hosted an online debate on peer-review. This took the form of 22 commissioned articles on a range of topics. Readers could comment on the articles on a peer-review debate blog.

We have now revamped the blog as a more general discussion forum about peer review, calling it Peer to Peer. We welcome scientists and others who have reviewed, are reviewing or would like to review for the Nature journals. This is your blog: we will post articles about the peer-review process, link to others (see Connotea section of the left-hand vertical sidebar), and answer your questions about the Nature journals’ peer review policy.

Please send your brief article or question to us at the peer-reviewers’ email address, and we’ll feature your feedback on Peer to Peer.

The Nature peer-review debate is fully archived on Peer to Peer. Click on the category “peer review debate” on the left to see all the commissioned articles and the comments so far. We encourage you to join in the conversation with us.

Welcome to Nautilus, Nature Publishing Group’s discussion forum for all our authors – past, present and future. On this blog we will be providing advice about getting your work published in our journals, and providing information about our author services.

You can contact us either directly by email or by commenting on any of the posts here. Either way, your message will be read by an editor at a Nature journal, and we’ll reply to you, either directly or via the blog.

Who are we? I am Maxine Clarke, an editor at Nature , and I will be doing most of the posting here for the time being, as well as reading your emails and comments. My colleague Linda Miller, US executive editor of Nature and executive editor of the Nature monthly journals publishing primary research, will also be posting occasionally (I hope!).

Once again, welcome to your Nature Publishing Group community blog — we look forward to many future interactions with you.