I apologize for the blatant promotion, but I wanted to bring your attention to a new forum designed to spur on discussion involving interesting neuroscience papers. I categorized this under “What’s new in NN?”, except here, the “NN” is different: Nature Network. This platform has been around for some time now, but I am new to it. I recommend that you check out the site, as it aims to connect scientists on both the local and global levels (but unless you are in Boston or London, the local part is still being rolled out).

In the Neuroscience group, we are starting an online journal club featuring interesting papers from any journal for discussion. These journal clubs will be written up by experts in each respective field (except those that I do; I am going to fake my way through whatever topics don’t get covered by the experts…). These experts will be students and post-docs discussing somebody else’s work, in the classic spirit of a journal club.

This forum is designed to teach the non-specialist about certain neuroscience sub-fields in which they may have some interest, as well as to feature important findings that very well may pertain to the current work of the specialist. Hopefully, the discussion will include the following (and more): questions being asked regarding the data or conclusions of the study; inquiries made as to how to successfully implement particular methodologies; reasons given for why additional data would help the authors solidify their conclusions; suggestions floated as to what the next steps should be in the follow-up experiments.

We will try to get one posted once a week or once every two weeks; hopefully we can at least meet the latter goal. As usual, suggestions and comments on this proposal are welcome, and if you would like to participate or suggest a paper, feel free to contact me directly.