The launch of Nature Middle East was officially celebrated today on 5 May, 2010, as part of the Saudi E-Health Conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Over 110 post graduate students and researchers, mostly from clinical and medical backgrounds, turned up for the event, which was spread out over two workshops.
For the first part of the workshop, I took the attendees through a tour of the new portal, explaining each of the different sections and how they can serve the science community. This introduction also touched on the past scientific achievements of the region and the potential that has been building up in the Arab world over the past few years for a science renaissance.
Our aim is to make the website the central home for the scientific and medical community in the region. They can come for the latest science news and information about new grants, conferences and science policies. It is also poised to be an interactive zone where the researchers can get together to share their thoughts and ideas about all issues of the region and maybe link up and collaborate on further work.
This was followed by a presentation by Nick Campbell, managing editor of Nature, who talked about how researchers can get published in high-impact journals, with a specific focus on Nature.
The talk explained the relevance of getting published in Nature, and how selective the process is. After all, only less than 10% of original research papers submitted every week end up getting published in the multidisciplinary journal. In fact, more than half of the papers submitted are refused by the editors without reaching the peer-review process.
Campbell went on to explain how researchers can benchmark their research and measure its quality against other papers, and how they can increase that quality in order to get a better chance at getting published.
This is particularly interesting because, as advanced, high quality research centres increase in the region, the researchers need to be trained on how to showcase the science conducted in the region by publishing in high impact journals, thus raising the rating of their institutes along.
The Nature Middle East sponsor, the King Abdallah International Medical Research Centre (KAIMRC), hosted the event and talked about their vision for sponsoring the new science portal. Mohammed Zamakhshary, who is the head of the Population Health unit at KAIMRC, talked about the 10-year plan they have to transform KAIMRC by 2017 into a world-class research centre.
A short tour of the Arab world is planned in the future, where the workshops will be repeated in different countries to reach more researchers in different parts of the region.