Category Archives: Publications

Publications

Update on Nature Precedings

Posted on by
Reply

Timo Hannay, head of NPG’s web publishing department, provides some more information about Nature Precedings on the Nascent blog . From his post:

“all the content is released under the Creative Commons Attribution License and the service is free to authors and readers. We’re working with some of our partners to mirror the content to ensure its [Nature Precedings’] long-term free availability (whatever might happen to Nature Publishing Group). And what a great list of partners they are: the British Library, the European Bioinformatics Institute, Science Commons and the Wellcome Trust. ”https://www.nature.com/press_releases/Natureprecedingspr.pdf">See our press release for their statements about the project.

We expect to add one or two more partners in the not-too-distant future, and convene a group of forward-thinking senior scientists to advise us on future development of the service. Right from the beginning, Precedings was conceived not as an NPG-only project but as a collaborative endeavour to open up scientific communication. To that end, we’ll also be reaching out to other publishers in the weeks to come to ensure that this initiative works effectively alongside the existing journal publishing channel, which Precedings seeks to complement.

If you’ve got comment, please post it below, go to the Nature Precedings Group on Nature Network, or write to precedings-at-nature-dot.com."

Nature Reviews Microbiology vaccine focus

Posted on by
Reply

Vaccines are among the most useful and cost-effective tools for reducing the morbidity and mortality associated with infectious diseases. This month, a special Focus issue of Nature Reviews Microbiology highlights some of the latest progress in vaccine development and the pitfalls that have been encountered along the way.The topics covered range from advances in our understanding of the immune response that will help in the development of new adjuvants and anti-bacterial vaccines, to the latest work on the development of a dengue virus vaccine. The accompanying library collects the most relevant recent publications from Nature Publishing Group.

Here is the table of contents for the vaccine focus collection.

GeoChip at the Omics Gateway

Posted on by
Reply

The Omics Gateway is the portal for all information relevant to large-scale genomics and biology from Nature Publishing Group. Regularly updated, this comprehensive collection enables you to view relevant archived and recent content drawn from the complete range of our publications. Most of the content is free for you to view online. The latest article higlight is GeoChip, a comprehensive microarray for investigating biogeochemical, ecological and environmental processes. from the ISME Journal. This article describes the first use of GeoChip, a comprehensive functional gene microarray suitable for studying the geochemical, ecological and environmental processes of diverse microbial communities. This new methodology allows for the screening of environmental samples across more than 10,000 genes belonging to over 150 of the most important functional gene families.

The Omics Gateway provides life scientists a convenient portal into publications relevant to large-scale biology from journals throughout NPG. By organizing our papers and web focus projects on large-scale biology into this comprehensive, topical, one-stop web portal, we hope to help you quickly reach the resources you need to study the “ome” of your choice and to keep you up-to-date with the most significant research in that area.

Nature China’s opening conferences

Posted on by
Reply

Last week, Nature held mini-conferences in Beijing and Shanghai to celebrate the launch of Nature China. There were over 200 attendees in Beijing, and Liu Depei, president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and vice president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, gave the opening remarks, together with Daoxiang Sun of Tsinghua University Council. Also speaking were Huang Laiqiang of Tsinghua University, who last year was a coauthor of a paper in Nature on self pollination in orchids (Nature 441, 945-946; 2006), and Xiaolin Zhang, head of the Innovation Center China of AstraZeneca and sponsor of Nature China, who outlined the company’s activities in the region.

A similar event was held at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS), organized by Dangsheng Li, deputy editor in chief of Cell Research, a journal based at SIBS and part of Nature Publishing Group’s Asia-Pacific academic journal programme. The meeting was attended by about 120 people, with talks by Jarui Wu, vice president of SIBS, and Hong-Wei Xue, deputy director of the Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who provided tips on publishing in international journals.

According to results presented at the conferences, in 2006, scientists from mainland China and Hong Kong published more than 80,000 scientific papers that were indexed by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), bringing the output of scientific research at the same level (in numbers) as the United Kingdom and Japan.

Additional data from ISI indicate that the number of high impact papers from China with large numbers of citations is also increasing rapidly in number year on year.

Every week, Nature China’s editors select some of the best recently published research from across the scientific and medical literature, and provide short easy-to-understand summaries of the results. The website also allows users to recommend research articles for inclusion, and to vote on those recommendations. Furthermore, the website has an archive of highlights of 154 research articles published in top scientific journals since 2000, and in the case of research articles highlighted from Nature journals, the original full text scientific articles are made freely available to registered users of Nature China.

Nature Precedings is now launched

Posted on by
Reply

Nature Precedings, as its title implies, enables researchers to share, discuss and cite their early findings on the web — all free access. It provides a lightly moderated and relatively informal channel for scientists to disseminate information, especially recent experimental results and emerging conclusions. In this sense, it is designed to complement traditional peer-reviewed journals, allowing researchers to make informal communications such as conference papers or presentations more widely available and enabling them to be formally cited. This, in turn, allows them to solicit community feedback and establish priority over their results or ideas.

Covering biology, medicine, chemistry and the Earth sciences, the site will host a wide range of research documents, including preprints, unpublished manuscripts, white papers, technical reports, supplementary findings, posters and presentations. All submissions are reviewed by staff curators and accepted only if they are considered to be legitimate scientific contributions. No judgement is to be made about the quality or uniqueness of the work, and submissions are not subjected to peer review before they are released. Because of this, accepted submissions will usually be published within one working day, and no charge is made to either authors or readers.

Nature Precedings makes use of social features such as tagging, voting and commenting to facilitate the discovery of especially interesting and relevant content. As well as an RSS feed for recent submissions, there are separate RSS feeds available for 13 broad subject categories, so scientists can keep an eye on newly uploaded content in their own fields.

We anticipate that the content will be mirrored by academic partner organizations, several of whom have been involved with Nature Publishing Group in developing this service. As well as allowing it to become incorporated into the substantial information hubs already provided by these organizations, this federated approach will also help to ensure the long-term availability of the content — and act as a practical guarantee of the Nature Publishing Group’s pledge not to charge readers for access.

Find out more about Nature Precedings here.

From the Nature Network blogs

Posted on by
Reply

If you’ve wondered about starting your own blog, have a look at Nature Network, where scientists of all kinds are blogging. It is free, quick and simple to set up the blog, and you’ll find yourself connected with researchers and others with overlapping interests.

You can see who is blogging at Nature Network by going to the blog index and reading whichever blogs catch your interest. Recent posts from all the blogs are featured on the blog index page, so that’s another way to see what’s truly current. Here are a few posts that I’ve enjoyed reading this week:

In her blog Mind the Gap, Jennifer Rohn records what it’s like to return to the bench after a spell in the science literary scene running the LabLit website. The post In which I rejoice in muscle memory is a vivacious description of planning her first experiment since her long break. "With due consideration of my long hiatus, I showed what I thought was a ridiculously stripped-down plan to the lab’s two leading experts on Drosophila cell culture RNAi: a pilot tissue culture experiment with a mere eight samples. I waited expectantly as the Ph.D. student studied my scribbles. But then he slowly started shaking his head. “Your first experiment in four years?” he said dubiously. “Only four wells, maximum. Get rid of half of this.” "

Attila Csordas, whose Network blog is called Science Hacker, looks at the role of comic books in science popularization. Cartoons are terrific education tools, writes Attila, as well as howtoons, cartoons showing kids of all ages “How To” build things. “What about cartoons for scientists? After all, experimental results, short communications and complete articles could be presented in a cartoon way, let us just juxtapose the figures of an article with good graphics and build a story upon them.” Nature ‘s synthetic biology cover and online comic in its issue of 24 November 2005 being a good example.

In her Network blog Time for a Change, Linda Cooper suggests that "there’s a better way to write a scientific article. Currently, published articles are unnecessarily difficult to read and researchers need to be trained in how to write about their research." Here she explains why the active voice, useful transitions and clear subjects help readers. The post at the link takes a paragraph from the Allen Brain Atlas part by part, providing an original, a descontstruction and a revised version of each section. Head on over and tell her which you think is best.

These are just three of the many lively blogs on the Nature Network. Check it out, and have a go yourself.

ENCODE project web focus and poster

Posted on by
Reply

The ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) project has set out to identify all the functional elements in the human genome. Detailed in a Nature web focus, a pilot project on 1% of the genome reveals new insights about how the information coded in the DNA blueprint is turned into functioning systems in the living cell. You can download a free poster at the Nature web focus, read the free-access article by the ENCODE project team (Nature 447, 799-816; 2007), and read related news stories, articles and information about the project.

Stem-cell science and publishing news

Posted on by
Reply

The first e-newsletter of Nature Reports Stem Cells, out now and free (sign up at the home page), provides the latest news and information about research, policy, ethics, business and medicine of stem cell science. The editors’ welcome letter is here, and the associated blog, The Niche, is here.

A selection of this week’s stories:

Skin Cells to Stem Cells

Recent research promises embryonic stem cells, minus eggs and embryos. Three labs transformed mouse skin cells (fibroblasts) into cells that seem to pass muster as embryonic stem cells. If it works for humans, a simple biopsy could yield patient-specific sources of neurons, cardiomyocytes, or any other useful cell type. Read an interview with Shinya Yamanaka, a scientist who found the transforming recipe.

Man or Beast? Man and Beast!

Ian Wilmut is Nature Reports Stem Cells’ first Featured Editor. This week, he writes about how part-human part-animal cells could produce some of the most powerful tools yet for unraveling human disease, he talks about current research that excites him most, and he remembers Dolly.

Eggless cloning

Unfertilized eggs have long been the limiting resource for attempts to make genetically tailored human embryonic stem cells. If a new technique for cloning mice from fertilized eggs works in humans, they might not be necessary. This week Monya Baker writes about whether the new procedure for cloning using zygotes instead of oocytes changes the ethical terrain, and also tries to define just what eggs have that makes reprogramming work. Read an interview with Davor Solter, a scientist who, decades ago, convinced researchers that eggs were essential.

And now for something completely different

For a really fresh perspective on the technique for cloning from zygotes, read this fortnight’s Inside the Paper. Pioneered by Nature Reports Stem Cells, this new form of science reporting posts edited discussions between authors and reviewers from the peer review process. Learn what the foremost experts in the field had to say about a paper’s context, strengths, and shortcomings. See what the authors saw, and read their responses. (And you can add your own comments on The Niche.)

See all this, and more, at Nature Reports Stem Cells — and it is all free.

Scintilla now open to all

Posted on by
Reply

Nascent: Scintilla

The latest new website in a week of new launches hectic even by the standards of Nature Publishing Group is a social site called Scintilla. Alf Eaton, who with Euan Adie in NPG’s web publishing division created the site, explains all at the above-linked post at Nascent. Briefly, Scintilla is an aggregator of publication databases, news stories and blogs about science which users can read, rate and recommend to each other. It has its own discussion group here, for people to provide comments and feedback.

Scintilla has been welcomed by several scientist bloggers, including Neil Saunders. Attilla Csordas, who blogs at Partial Immortalization and at The Niche (the Nature Reports Stem Cells blog), having earlier in the week called Nature Publishing Group the Google of science publishing, is now moved to refer to us as “Natureplex”. (Read his initial reactions to Scintilla here.) What next?

Nature Nanotechnology June issue is out

Posted on by
Reply

Nature Nanotechnology is now in volume 2. The latest issue of this second volume covers topics as diverse as: processing nanowire devices; imaging defects in nanotubes; DNA nanochannels; transparent and flexible nanoelectronics; polymer nanofibres; and the separation of left- and right-handed nanotubes. These original research articles are complemented by the News & Views section, a Commentary article about the challenges and opportunities that ‘post-academic’ science presents for the nanoscience and technology community, an Editorial about the role of nanoscience in combating climate change, and a Thesis article about the regulation of new nano-enabled products and devices in nanomedicine.

June’s Progress article, FREE to access online, is Biomimetics of photonic nanostructures, by Andrew R. Parker and Helen E. Townley. It reviews the use of diatoms, viruses and other living objects to fabricate photonic nanostructures.