I’ve been a bit quiet on the blog here over the last couple of weeks, because we’ve been so busy getting our new website ready for the big day today. We made it! As you can see, this website looks pretty different…much, much better in my humble opinion. This is the result of a lot of hard work over the last several months by our tech team and we’re continuing to work on it: fixing bugs, making improvements.

Let me give you a brief tour of the new features:

Nature Network. We’ve expanded the scope of our site to make Nature Network global in scope. This means that we’re inviting scientists from all over the world to visit and join the online community, post comments, blog, create and join groups, etc.

Discussion forums. Each group has its own forum so that members of each group can now have conversations by posting messages and replies. I encourage you to post comments and questions in the group forums that you’re in, join other groups and create new ones. You’ll find the groups here. Talk about the latest papers in your field, protocols, reagents, equipment, any other issues. We want to be the host of some vibrant conversations!

Nature Network Boston. NNB remains essentially the same; we still have local events, jobs and news. The main change is that we are now nested within Nature Network as a local channel. You can still form local communities and groups if you’re in Boston. But now you can also create and join global groups no matter where you’re based. And you can easily navigate between the local and global pages. Clicking on the Groups, Blogs, Forums, and People tabs in the Boston navigation bar simply filters the content on Nature Network by city, so you easily find Boston groups, blogs, forums, and people.

Design. new logo, new colors and fonts, new layout and navigation menus. Hopefully, this will be more pleasing on the eye.

This website is bigger and way more complicated than any other website Nature Publishing Group has created, I would say. We’re on a steep learning curve so please bear with us if things don’t look or work perfectly. We intend to release repairs and improvements regularly (hopefully once a week) over the coming months, so I hope you’ll keep coming back to check us out.

Of course, this site will only get better with your feedback. If you spot something that doesn’t seem right, post a message on the What’s Wrong forum. Post your ideas about new features you’d like to see on NN on the What’s Next forum.

Or you can email us at network at nature.com or email me at c.lok at boston.nature.com.

Enjoy!

In the meantime, check out the special package of stories I’ve just posted on energy and climate change.