Category Archives: Journal journeys

Nature Chemistry, volume 1, issue 1

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The first issue is now live, and freely available for everyone to read and (hopefully) enjoy.

Stu and Gav are flying off to Salt Lake City as I type for the Spring ACS Meeting. And tomorrow, Anne goes to Tokyo to work there from now on, and will also be visiting the Japanese Chemical Society Meeting starting next week. Feel free to visit the stand at the ACS exposition or to chat to the editors as they make their jetlagged way around!

I shan’t copy and paste the entire table of contents here, but apart from what will be the usual mix of research articles, reviews, news & views and research highlights, there are a few extras that I’ll draw attention to.

Most apt to The Sceptical Chymist is Blogroll – it’s tucked away in a column next to the Research Highlights and is a quick overview of what’s caught our eye in the blogosphere recently. Who knows, one of your posts or comments could be in there…

One of the most exciting things in the first issue is the feature The future of chemistry. We asked eight leading lights to write about what they see as the future of their discipline and it adds up to a very interesting read.

Finally, as is really well outlined by Egon at Chem-bla-ics, lots of the papers contain data-rich ‘compound pages’. In them you can click on a bold compound number to view a full structure, with InChIs, links to PubChem, etc.

But wait, there’s more! Some of the papers have even more than that. If you click on the ‘Show compounds’ link in the right-hand navigation, compound names in the text will appear highlighted. Clicking on them then reveals links to PubChem and ChemSpider. Thanks to everyone who commented on our previous posts – the feedback was listened to.

So there we are! Almost 14 months since Stu became Chief Ed, ~50 weeks after Gav, Steve and I started, ~6 months after Anne started and at the end of our Technical Editor, Laura’s 3rd week, we have an issue. Apparently, we have to do this EVERY MONTH!

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Journal journeys: Day 285, Relocation, relocation

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So, here I am in the Boston office of Nature Publishing Group….

My relocation, long foretold on our ‘About the editors page’, has finally happened. I’ve been looking forward to the move, but with some trepidation due to an anticipated large amount of form filling – complicated by the fact that I have to think carefully before writing a six-digit date!

As it turns out, the most difficult part was getting, not the visa, but the appointment for the visa application – ask me at a conference and I’ll explain the details. My passage through US customs was also less time consuming than expected – taking no more than 20 min from landing at Logan airport to getting in a taxi to the office.

So down to the nitty-gritty of moving to a new country – in the last few days I’ve completed forms I-9 and W-4, signed up for 401(k) and several other things that also presumably have an alphanumeric code. In the spare time around the form filling, I managed to find a place to live – thanks to the wonder that is Craigslist.

Having got through what I believe to be the lion’s share of the bureaucratic necessities, I can now work on the essentials. This morning, I looked up the values of nickels and dimes on Wikipedia – despite the many references to them in films, I was not sure of their actual value until today. The next thing on my list is to find somewhere to watch the football soccer – I don’t understand american football yet, so any pointers will be welcome. Baseball is a little easier to follow, and as for hockey: “you mean ice hockey don’t you?”

It’s Thanksgiving soon, so I need to find a good recipe for pumpkin pie, or be nice enough to my new office mates to get an invite!

Steve

Stephen Davey (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Journal journeys: Day 285, Relocation, relocation

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So, here I am in the Boston office of Nature Publishing Group….

My relocation, long foretold on our ‘About the editors page’, has finally happened. I’ve been looking forward to the move, but with some trepidation due to an anticipated large amount of form filling – complicated by the fact that I have to think carefully before writing a six-digit date!

As it turns out, the most difficult part was getting, not the visa, but the appointment for the visa application – ask me at a conference and I’ll explain the details. My passage through US customs was also less time consuming than expected – taking no more than 20 min from landing at Logan airport to getting in a taxi to the office.

So down to the nitty-gritty of moving to a new country – in the last few days I’ve completed forms I-9 and W-4, signed up for 401(k) and several other things that also presumably have an alphanumeric code. In the spare time around the form filling, I managed to find a place to live – thanks to the wonder that is Craigslist.

Having got through what I believe to be the lion’s share of the bureaucratic necessities, I can now work on the essentials. This morning, I looked up the values of nickels and dimes on Wikipedia – despite the many references to them in films, I was not sure of their actual value until today. The next thing on my list is to find somewhere to watch the football soccer – I don’t understand american football yet, so any pointers will be welcome. Baseball is a little easier to follow, and as for hockey: “you mean ice hockey don’t you?”

It’s Thanksgiving soon, so I need to find a good recipe for pumpkin pie, or be nice enough to my new office mates to get an invite!

Steve

Stephen Davey (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Journal journeys: Day 266, We’re hiring!

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So, we’re 266 days in. Or at least Stu is – Steve, Gav and I are just over the 6 months mark (crucially past our “probation” period, which means we’ve got to screw up REALLY REALLY badly for Stu to sack us!). How do you think we’re doing?

So far we’ve: racked up a lot of airmiles, enthused about the journal to lots of people, argued among ourselves (and yourselves) about what we want the articles to look like, welcomed the fifth editor and most importantly opened the doors to papers.

As the papers walk the tightrope of peer review and we get closer to our first issue, we need people to handle the papers once we’ve accepted them. Specifically, an Art Editor and a Technical Editor (oddly, I can only find the job at the Guardian, but I assure you we really do need one).

The Art Editor will ‘liaise constructively with editorial colleagues [us!] and suppliers to produce striking and attractive artwork for the journal’. As you might expect, ‘They must also be highly proficient in Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign/QuarkXPress. Two years’ experience in magazine publishing is essential [… and k]nowledge of Chemdraw and/or prior experience on chemistry publications would be an advantage.’

The Technical Editor ‘will be responsible, with other parts of the company, for developing our technical editing tools and workflows, as well as ensuring published manuscripts ‘lead the way’ in chemistry publishing’. So do you ‘have a good degree in a chemistry related subject and enjoy attention to detail.’? Relevant experience would be an advantage. The post isn’t just Nature Chemistry either, it’s for a range of Nature journals.

The deadlines are pretty soon, but dust off those CVs and get applying! One thing that isn’t mentioned in the job ads is the free canteen, or the weekly cake competition. How can you say no?

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Journal journeys: Day 266, We’re hiring!

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So, we’re 266 days in. Or at least Stu is – Steve, Gav and I are just over the 6 months mark (crucially past our “probation” period, which means we’ve got to screw up REALLY REALLY badly for Stu to sack us!). How do you think we’re doing?

So far we’ve: racked up a lot of airmiles, enthused about the journal to lots of people, argued among ourselves (and yourselves) about what we want the articles to look like, welcomed the fifth editor and most importantly opened the doors to papers.

As the papers walk the tightrope of peer review and we get closer to our first issue, we need people to handle the papers once we’ve accepted them. Specifically, an Art Editor and a Technical Editor (oddly, I can only find the job at the Guardian, but I assure you we really do need one).

The Art Editor will ‘liaise constructively with editorial colleagues [us!] and suppliers to produce striking and attractive artwork for the journal’. As you might expect, ‘They must also be highly proficient in Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign/QuarkXPress. Two years’ experience in magazine publishing is essential [… and k]nowledge of Chemdraw and/or prior experience on chemistry publications would be an advantage.’

The Technical Editor ‘will be responsible, with other parts of the company, for developing our technical editing tools and workflows, as well as ensuring published manuscripts ‘lead the way’ in chemistry publishing’. So do you ‘have a good degree in a chemistry related subject and enjoy attention to detail.’? Relevant experience would be an advantage. The post isn’t just Nature Chemistry either, it’s for a range of Nature journals.

The deadlines are pretty soon, but dust off those CVs and get applying! One thing that isn’t mentioned in the job ads is the free canteen, or the weekly cake competition. How can you say no?

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Journal journeys: Day 189, Paper trail

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For those of you who haven’t noticed, Nature Chemistry is now open for business – our online submission system is up and running…

Such a small sentence, but it is the culmination of a huge effort by a large number of people.

Online submission systems don’t just build themselves, it takes a number of talented individuals to make sure that they are compiled correctly and run smoothly. Many test manuscripts passed through an imaginary peer-review process and were evaluated – not particularly thoroughly – by the likes of Dr Green, Professor Black and Mr Brown. Inboxes were flooded with large numbers of e-mails to make sure the correct message was dispatched under the appropriate circumstances. After all, you don’t want to accept a manuscript when all you actually are trying to do is send someone a message confirming their submission… try getting out of that one!

To coincide with the online submission system going live, we needed to put together a guide to authors. To put together such a document, we needed to sit down as a team and decide what we actually wanted to put in it. What article types do we want? How do we want them submitted? And so on… In addition to the editorial concerns, our production department also cast their eye over the GTA to make sure their requirements were met and then the whole document was copy-edited. If we’re telling you not to make mistakes when compiling your paper, it would be embarrassing if we had mistakes or inconsistencies in the GTA.

That’s still not all though. Web production had to put the GTA on our website and that also involves tweaking the navigation on the site and making sure that all other related sites at NPG now point to the right place. Marketing needed to know when we were going live so that they can get the message out to the wider chemical community and so on….

And so, the manuscripts are starting to arrive – so I probably shouldn’t spend too much time blogging today, I need to go and look up some references. (Although I plan to put up a post in the near future about the choices we made concerning article types).

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Journal journeys: Day 179, Picture this…

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It’s been a while, I know, I’m sorry…

So, after counting out which day of our journal journey we’re on, number 179 it turns out, here is another entry in the life of setting up a journal.

At the ACS meeting in New Orleans earlier this year (one I will have a hard time forgetting) we gave away Nature Chemistry labcoats – or at any rate we got people to sign up for a couple of e-alerts and then promised to send them a labcoat. Well, we’ve followed through on that promise and if you were one of those who signed up, either your labcoat should have arrived quite recently, or it will be doing so in the next few days. (I’ve had reports of them turning up in some cases – let us know if yours has arrived by commenting on this post..).

We’ve decided to do the same thing again in Philly at the next ACS meeting – sign up for a couple of e-alerts at the Nature Publishing Group stand at the expo (booth 1815/1817) and we’ll give you a Nature Chemistry labcoat for free. Although it is not confirmed yet, we may even have some stock at the booth and so if you are quick, you might not have to wait to have yours mailed.

For a bit of fun we’ve decided to run a competition based on the labcoats… – and full details can be found on the Nature Chemistry Facebook group. We’re asking you send us photos of you (or your friends) in your shiny new Nature Chemistry labcoat (and the logo should be visible so that we know you’re not just using any old labcoat) – and the five most imaginative ones will win a year-long print subscription to the journal. Please keep the contents of the pictures SAFE (no standing next to explosions or flaming bottles of BuLi) and CLEAN (I’m not going to even explain that one…).

The competition will run through until Feb 2009, so you have plenty of time to snap some cool pics and send them to us – please go to the Nature Chemistry Facebook group for details of how to send us the photos – and that is also where we will post any photos (only the clean and safe ones though) that we receive. Feel free to send in as many photos of you (or your friends) in your Nature Chemistry labcoat as you wish (within reason) – and we’ll be writing back to you in March next year if you’ve won!

So as not to discriminate against those who couldn’t make it to New Orleans and won’t be attending the ACS meeting in Philly, feel free to design your own custom Nature Chemistry labcoat and send us your pictures (again, clean and safe please…)

Good luck!

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Journal journeys: Day 132, Out and about

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Hi everyone,

We thought it was time to show our faces in public and let you know where we’re all heading now conference season is upon us.

First to escape the office is Steve, going to ICOS17 in Daejon, Korea, on 22-27 June. On the other side of the world, I’ll be attending DD11 in Berkeley on 23-25 June.

Closer to home, Stu’s going to a nano meeting in Reading on 26-27 June, before visiting some chemistry deparments in the Mid-West US in July. Steve’s next out again, visiting ICOMC23 in Rennes, France, on 13-18 July. Then it’s my turn again at ICCC38 in Jerusalem on 20-25 July.

Gav’s not being left behind to deal with everything in the office — he’s off to the ACS meeting in Philadelphia on 18-21 August. We’re also planning some visits to chemistry departments, both in the UK and near the conference venues, spreading the Nature Chemistry word.

We hope to see lots of you on our travels, so feel free to stop us for a chat. We might even give you some free post-it notes…

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Journal journeys: Day 132, Out and about

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Hi everyone,

We thought it was time to show our faces in public and let you know where we’re all heading now conference season is upon us.

First to escape the office is Steve, going to ICOS17 in Daejon, Korea, on 22-27 June. On the other side of the world, I’ll be attending DD11 in Berkeley on 23-25 June.

Closer to home, Stu’s going to a nano meeting in Reading on 26-27 June, before visiting some chemistry deparments in the Mid-West US in July. Steve’s next out again, visiting ICOMC23 in Rennes, France, on 13-18 July. Then it’s my turn again at ICCC38 in Jerusalem on 20-25 July.

Gav’s not being left behind to deal with everything in the office — he’s off to the ACS meeting in Philadelphia on 18-21 August. We’re also planning some visits to chemistry departments, both in the UK and near the conference venues, spreading the Nature Chemistry word.

We hope to see lots of you on our travels, so feel free to stop us for a chat. We might even give you some free post-it notes…

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

JJ: Day 98, Service with a ‘Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry Specification’

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Hi everyone,

This week the Nature Chemistry team have been thinking about how we display our wonderful papers (when we finally open the doors and eventually publish a paper, anyway).

We’d really like to see what everyone else thinks about some of the things we discussed after looking at what other journals have to offer.

So, the things we’re interested in:

(1) HTML vs PDF: does anyone read the HTML articles? Do you read the PDF on-screen or print it out?

(2) Big vs little graphics: what does everyone else think about the tiny size of the graphics in ACS html articles?

(3) Tagging/’semantic web’: what do you think about the toys on the RSC’s Project Prospect? What kind of things would you like to see tagged/linked to other content in Nature Chemistry? For instance, Steve would love to do something with named reactions.

(4) 3D molecular structures: do these help your understanding of a paper?

(5) How useful to you are InChIs and SMILES?

(6) Forward linking: the RSC and Elsevier/Science Direct offer this – do you use it? Would you use an RSS feed that alerted you to new citations of a particular paper.

(7) Would you actually comment on papers if there was a comments box at the end?

(8) We really like the Biochemical Society’s HTML article style (sample one here) – do you?

If we could get a deluge of posts about this one, we’d be overjoyed! And this is your chance to voice your opinion on what a Nature Chemistry paper should look like.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)