A year ago today, Nature Network went live. It’s been a fun, exciting, sometimes exhausting but overall rewarding year for the NN team. Thanks for reading and using us and for contributing to the success of NN.

To commemorate, we’ve posted a special timeline showing how the website has grown and developed.

I wanted to throw in a few other interesting things that have happened on NN lately:

Blogs: The Nature Network bloggers forming a nice community. They recently voted on a nickname for themselves and have begun talking about organizing meetups.

Some of our bloggers have reported that by blogging on NN, they’ve gotten more and higher quality comments on their blog (from scientists) than they did when their blogs were hosted elsewhere. One person reported that he’s gotten several speaking invitations as a result of his posts. Anna Kushnir of Harvard wrote about how her experience on NN helped her get a part-time blogging job, a good thing as she is now wrapping up her PhD and looking for jobs outside of academia. And Massimo Pinto, a postdoc in Rome, says here that: “blogging on this platform is enriching me as a communicator, and is generating some constructive discussions with the readers.”

Groups/Forums: We’ve had activity in some forums really take off in membership and activity, such as Nature News and Opinion, Publishing in the New Millennium, Ask the Nature Editor and the India and Nature India groups, among many others. We hope to see more country/nationality based groups formed.

We’re also working on getting more groups to operate as online journal clubs. The Neuroscience group is taking the lead on this. The group’s moderator, Noah Gray, an editor with Nature Neuroscience and blogger on Action Potential, has gotten several scientists to post summaries of and questions about recent papers, asking for people to comment. If you’re a brain scientist, I invite you to join. If not, I invite you start up a similar online journal club for your field on NN.

I want to end on a quote from one of our users about his experience on Nature Network:

“Sometimes a brief outing to the forums takes your mind away from the proposals and paper writing. When you stroll back you may be a little inspired and a little refreshed with new ideas. Abraham Lincoln once said if he was given six hours to chop down a tree he would spend the first four hours sharpening his axe. We need to ponder what we do before we plunge ourselves into the chaos. The Network offers such opportunities for us to know what our peers are thinking and how excited or puzzled they feel about their research projects.” – Pu-Chun Ke, Assistant Professor of Biophysics, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Clemson University