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Let’s talk about #SciComm

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Science communication is a young field with many voices and few guidelines. Let’s find a way to combine our voices in order to protect the integrity of research endeavors, says Judith Reichel.

There are plenty of reasons to become active in the field of science communication, and for many early career researchers (ECRs) still exploring research, it’s a great way to find their niche and voice their opinions.

Yet, like many of its participants, the field of science communication itself is fairly young, and is constantly evolving from its original aim — to translate scientific findings to the public, in order to raise awareness and funding for the grand scientific endeavor. When 3000 new academic papers are published every day, it‘s impossible for any single scientist to keep track of every development.

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Science communication is practiced by a range of journalists, editors, freelance writers and free-time writers, yet the aim remains the same: to communicate important findings in quick soundbites that provide enough information for scientists but are still digestible to the general public. Continue reading →

Getting the message out

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How do you engage people with your science?

So you’re all over Twitter and Facebook and you even have a blog. Good on you – you’re your own public-relations and outreach specialist, getting the word out about your science. But what about the other kind of outreach – what’s still called science communication? Can you talk with a member of the press for an interview, or deliver your message to key thought leaders – such as government officials who decide on funding agencies’ annual budgets? Is it just a bit scarier than tweeting?

Continue reading →

Skills for your next networking adventure

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Networking may seem terrifying, but once you master the basics, it can be a real career boost

Naturejobs journalism competition winner Andy Tay

Networking during academic events such as conferences and seminars can be nerve-wrecking. Most of us can remember when we pretended to be engrossed in a programme booklet, wishing we could finally muster the courage to speak to the speaker with ground-breaking research standing ten feet away. You’re not alone, and there is a solution. Effective networking is a skill and anyone can benefit from more practice.

Do your homework

It’s a good habit to read the abstracts of presenters and download their papers to learn more about them before you join a conference. If you’re interested in their work, look up their profiles on platforms like Google Scholar, PudMed and ResearchGate. These platforms automatically update publications and can be better sources of information than many lab webpages, which are less regularly updated. By being diligent, and finding out more about the presenters and their research, you’ll be more confident and ready to ask critical, intelligent questions.

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Continue reading →

Social media: Handling casual sexism

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Don’t let unwelcome comments muffle your voice, instead speak out about your experiences, says Virginia Schutte.

Guest contributor Virginia Schutte 

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Virginia Schutte studying fiddler crabs in Taiwan’s salt marshes {credit}Virginia Schutte{/credit}

As scientists increasingly use social media for outreach, they open themselves to interactions with anyone who has access to the internet. This contact isn’t always going to be positive and may get personal. I recently had to decide what to do after someone said some unsavory things on my science website.

What I experienced is “casual” or “everyday” sexism. Sometimes sexism is so blatant or is acted upon in such a way that it has big repercussions (#distractinglysexy, I’m looking at you). This wasn’t that – this was a thought just about me that wasn’t particularly vulgar. But this kind of passing thought is common, even for scientists. For example, the Field Museum’s Emily Graslie devotes an episode of The Brain Scoop to discussing the frustrating comments she deals with “on a daily basis”. Some people are shocked less by casual sexism itself and more by the fact that people may not even react to it because it is so pervasive.

This person made it clear why he was visiting my website: it had nothing to do with my science and everything to do with my appearance. But this comment revealed his focus without damaging mine, so it didn’t rile me like his next assertion did: “[It’s] good to feel sexy, but it’s bad to mask it behind other means”. He implied that the only reason I have a science website at all is to give myself a place on the internet to post sexy pictures of myself. As if my site’s real purpose is so ludicrous as to be unbelievable.

I’m a marine ecologist. I’ve worked with everything from whales to fiddler crabs, but I’m pursuing a career in science communication. I want to connect people with science. Engaging non-scientists with the right information is the key to helping them make informed decisions that limit environmental impacts, therefore increasing quality of life.

I regularly post about my research and science in general on my professional Facebook page, “Virginia talks science with you”. The page is an outlet for my passion for science education and is also a way for me to gain experience communicating science. His comments popped up on my Facebook page after a post about Discovery’s Shark Week, so I can only assume he was reacting to photos of me around the site wearing a wetsuit. I’ll skip discussing most of my initial emotional reactions and focus on those that have risen to the fore now that more time has passed. Continue reading →

Antibodypedia on Facebook

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This has been cross-posted from the Stepwise Blog.

Those readers who are avid, or even obsessive, followers of Nature’s various blogs will know that NPG is collaborating with a website called Antibodypedia since December of 2011. Well, last week we passed a significant milestone with the listing of its half-millionth antibody. And this week we are launching a Facebook page.

Antibodypedia attempts to pull together information about the performance of publicly available antibodies so that researchers can make informed decisions about which will work best in their experiments before they buy them. The data we aggregate are things like links to research papers in which the antibodies have been used, technical data from the antibody suppliers, and the results of experiments performed by independent scientists.

Antibodypedia is a great resource as it is, but the aggregation and presentation of information already available, albeit in diverse places, is only half of the story. We want it to also be a place where researchers can share their experiences with specific antibodies and discuss the problems that arise with immuno-based cell biology techniques.

We already have a mechanism in place for researchers to submit experiments showing the performance of antibodies, and an advisory board to help us peer-review those experiments to ensure their usefulness; it is a form of micro-publication. Now we are taking a further step in engaging with the research community with our Facebook page.

Why Facebook?

Well, it would have been perfectly possible to incorporate a message board, discussion forums and the other functionalities of a community site into Antibodypedia but the plain fact is the vast majority of researchers are already members of a global social networking site, so why ask them to join another one? Instead we are making things easy and carving out a small corner of Facebook for all things antibody(pedia). We will of course be posting a lot ourselves on the page—news, highlighting of research papers, running polls etc.— but we also hope that antibody-using researchers will start their own discussions, share their experiences and try to solve each other’s problems.

The page launches today so please come, take a look and ‘like’ us. Then come back regularly over the next few weeks to follow our posts, take part in the polls and, of course, leave a comment or two.

Communities Happenings – 16th April

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Communities Happenings is a (usually) weekly post with news of interest to NPG’s online communities. The aim is to provide this info in one handy summary. Listings include tweetups and conferences which we’re attending and/or organising as well as new online tools, products or cool videos. We also occasionally flag up NPG special offers and competitions plus updates about NPG social media activities such as new accounts you might want to follow. Do let us know what you find most useful!

It was March of last year when we announced a new monthly discussion series called Science Online NYC (SoNYC), organised by Lou Woodley from nature.com, along with John Timmer of Ars Technica and Jeanne Garbarino and Joe Bonner of Rockefeller University.

SoNYC will soon celebrate its first birthday (you can read more about the celebrations here) and now, a year later, the SoNYC model is spreading to other cities! This week we will see the inaugural Science Online Seattle (SoSEA), Science Online Vancouver (SoVan) and Science Online Bay Area (SOBA).

The landscape of science communication is a dynamic and engaging place to be and the aim of SoNYC is to provide a regular forum for discussing topics related to communicating and carrying out science online. Expanding the SoNYC model to other locations in the US and Canada means that even more people can join in these valuable discussions.

SoSEA

The discussion series taking place in Seattle (#SoSEA) is co-organised by Liz Neeley, Jen Davison and Brian Glanz (you can find out more about the organisers here). Their first event is taking place today, Monday April 16th and will consider:

Shared Science: new realities for research and outreach in a networked world

The digital age is profoundly reshaping our information landscape, challenging us with an unprecedented opportunity to transform how we conduct and communicate research. Science Online Seattle will kick off with an exploration of what exactly it means to do science in a digital world. How does it work? Who is involved? What are their incentives? Where do we go from here? Join us as we explore how our worlds are changing and the new realities and future possibilities for science online.

The panel:

  • Lisa Graumlich, UW College of the Environment. Lisa is the Dean of a college which brings together some 200 faculty from a diverse set of scientific disciplines. She will talk about her vision for opening up the science of the University of Washington College of the Environment.
  • Brian Glanz, Open Science Federation.  Brian will discuss reproducibility, extensibility, affordability, accessibility and science at the speed of the internet.
  • Firas Khatib and Seth Cooper, Foldit.  Firas is a biomedical research scientist and Seth is creative director of the Center for Game Science at UW. They’ll talk about the stories behind the overwhelming success of Foldit.

If you can’t attend in person, follow the conversations on Twitter using the #SoSEA hashtag.

SoVAN

The discussion series taking place in Vancouver is co-organised by Catherine Anderson, Peter Newbury and Sarah Chow, (you can find out more about the organisers here). The event is taking place at the TELUS World of Science on Thursday 19th April, from 19:00 to 21:00 and will discuss:

Where do you get your science?

Practically every day, the internet gives us another option for finding scientific information. In addition to peer-reviewed journals and mainstream media, we now read blogs and wield heaps of social media tools like Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube. More sources publishing more content more frequently! How do we keep up? How do we know where to go for relevant, accurate science?

The panel:

  • Dr. Rosie Redfield – Named Nature’s most influential person of 2011, this associate professor of microbiology at UBC hit science fame through her blog RRResearch disputing NASA’s claim life exists in arsenic.
  • The local reporter will depend on availability but he/she will focus on science and work for a mainstream media organization.

If you can’t attend in person, keep an eye on the  #SoVan hashtag.

SoBA

The inaugural ScienceOnline Bay Area (SOBA) event is also taking place on Thursday 19 April, from 19:00 to 20:30 at the swissnex, San Francisco. ScienceOnline Bay Area is co-organized by David Harris, William Gunn, Megan Mansell Williams, and Aurelie Coulon. The first topic for discussion will be:

Data Visualization and Data Journalism in Science

Although not yet exactly common in science reporting, data journalism and data visualization are a natural fit to the material. But how does one go beyond the use of tabular data and basic analysis to data scraping and sophisticated statistical techniques? We’ll discuss the issues, methods, and tools of data visualization and data journalism and explore the cutting edge of these fields with some of the leading practitioners in the Bay Area.

Join us to officially kick off the SOBA series with short speaker presentations, a panel discussion, and audience Q&A. For those who’d like to continue the conversation, the gathering convenes at a nearby bar (to be announced at the event)!

The panel:

  • Peter Aldhous is San Francisco bureau chief with New Scientist magazine, reporting on biology, medicine, social sciences and the environment. He also teaches in the Science Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has developed curriculum materials in data analysis and visualization for the Academy of Art University inSan Francisco. Peter’s journalism has drawn on diverse sources of data, from earthquake records, through citations in stem cell research, to his own genome.
  • Michael Porath heads up the Engineering team at Visual.ly. The startup creates tools which aim to democratize the creation of data visualization. Michael has a background in Software Engineering with a focus on working with large-scale data sets. He holds a Masters in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley, with a specialization in Data Visualization. Michael also teaches a graduate-level course in Information Visualization at the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
  • Shane Shifflett is a software developer and reporter for The Bay Citizen who learned how to interrogate data while telling a story at Northwestern’s Medill School. There, he wrote about a drug-addled prostitute’s 300th arrest and the unforgiving criminal justice system which fails its inmates. He also reported on the Chicago Police Department’s wasteful deployment of cameras across its city. Before reporting, Shane studied computer science at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

If you are unable to attend in person, keep an eye on the #SOBA hashtag.

Each event is also live-streamed to give as many people as possible the chance to take part in the debate (more details soon). Check out this month’s SoNYC livestream, or take a look at our archives where you can view the previous meetings.

SciBarCamb tickets

This weekend sees the return of SciBarCamb – an unconference for scientists and technologists, taking place on the Friday 20th April and all day on Saturday 21st. The earlybird tickets have now sold out, but there are still some regular tickets left.  If you’d like to find out more about the event, read what co-organiser Eva Amsen has to say about it and you can follow the online chatter using the #SciBarCamb hashtag.

Events elsewhere

Our scientific events calendars have been freshly updated to include the latest scientific events. Make sure you check them out. Please do get in touch if we are missing any events or if you would like to contribute to this calendar or any of the other calendars listed below.

London Science Events

Cambridge Science Events

DC Science Events

NYC Sci Comm events

Boston Science Events

San Francisco Science Events

Paris Science Events

Job opportunity!

Nature Medicine seeks a Locum Assistant Editor to join its editorial team for a six-month period. Based in Nature Publishing Group’s New York office, the role involves working closely with the Chief Editor and other members of the journal team on all aspects of the editorial process, including manuscript evaluation, organizing peer-review, writing for the journal, and developing the content of the title, both in print and online. It’s a great way to explore the possibility of a career in scientific publishing. And if this is not the right opportunity for you, feel free to share it with a friend.The full details can be found here.

Facebook

If you haven’t already noticed, NPG’s Facebook pages now feature the new timeline format and to celebrate this launch we have been sharing a daily fact about NPG for the whole of April on the nature.com page:

Which fact have you found most surprising or interesting?

There’s more to come as we will be regularly updating the page – do let us know if there is something you would like to see. Finally, if you are not doing it already, make sure you click the “like” button and join in the conversation!


NPG’s Facebook pages have the new Timeline!

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From today, NPG’s Facebook pages have the new timeline format!


Want to know when Nature Publishing Group was founded? Or when the famous Watson and Crick paper was published? Or how about when The News blog was established?   On our main nature.com Facebook page, you can now browse our timeline dating back to the launch of Nature journal in 1869;  find pictures of the very first journal covers, learn about our journal editors, watch videos from the Nature Video team and more.

What’s changed?

Posts, milestones and highlighted posts: The new timeline format now spreads out regular posts across two columns on our wall. As well as the posts updating you on the latest news, blogs, special events and so on, you can now find historical archive material and landmark papers in milestones on the page (indicated by a flag icon).  We can also “highlight” posts so that you don’t miss the key content each day – these posts appear across both columns on the wall.

Direct Messaging: Fans of our pages can now send direct messages to us.  Let us know what you think, make suggestions  or ask questions via this new channel, accessible directly below the page’s cover photo.

Blogs: Blogs are now visible in the page header. If you click on this tab you can check out a stream of the latest posts from the nature.com’s blogs. Featured blogs include: Of Schemes and Memes, Soapbox Science (the nature.com guest blog) Action Potential (Nature‘s neuroscience blog),  Spoonful of Medicine (written by the Nature Medicine team), The Sceptical Chymist (with posts by the Nature Chemistry editors) and Nature Jobs.

Events: Also featured in the header are the latest scientific events that we organise. Not only can you view upcoming events and see who is attending, you can also view past events.

Photos: If you want to see pictures of our earliest journal covers, staff members, or conferences that we’ve attended, take a look at our new photo albums.

Videos: Watch select videos from the Nature Video team, including interviews with Nobel laureates, key scientific events such as the end of the space shuttle programme and in-depth discussions of science news.

 

Celebrations!

To celebrate the launch we will be sharing a daily fact about NPG for the whole of April. We’ve learnt things we never knew – which of the facts do you find most surprising or interesting?

There’s more to come as we will be continuously updating the page – do let us know if there is something you would like to see.

Finally, if you are not doing it already, make sure you click the “like” button and join in the conversation!

More Facebook Pages from  Nature Publishing Group

The nature.com page is not the only Facebook page that we populate. You can also receive updates from Nature News and Comment, the Nature Reviews journals, Nature Medicine, Scientific Reports, Nature Communications, Nature Climate Change and the portal sites Nature India and Nature Middle East. Finally, don’t forget to check out the pages for Nature Education (who host the Scitable blogs), NatureJobs and SoNYC, the monthly discussion series we run in NYC.

There’s also a Facebook interest list of NPG Facebook pages, that you can subscribe to so that you can decide how to receive updates from us in your Facebook news stream.

Looking forward to hearing what you think of our new looks!

Communities Happenings – 12th March

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SoNYC

SoNYC is the monthly discussion series that the nature.com Communities team organises in collaboration with Ars Technica and Rockefeller University. The event is also live-streamed and archived and we create a round-up post including a Storify storyboard of all the online conversations around the event. March 20th’s event is a re-scheduling of last October’s event on, Setting the research record straight and features Retraction Watch blogger, Ivan Oransky, John Krueger of the Office of Research Integrity and Liz Williams, Executive Editor of The Journal of Cell Biology:

The internet has enabled the faster and more thorough dissemination of published science, meaning that more eyes than ever are available to check the accuracy, veracity and integrity of the research record. With our enhanced ability to spot plagiarism and image manipulation electronically, it appears that the frequency with which we’ve flagged potentially fraudulent or plagiarized papers has gone up. This panel will look at the trends in retractions and how they relate to real or perceived increases in research misconduct. We hope to discuss what steps publications are taking to deal with the sloppy or fraudulent research practices that sometimes result in retractions, and also what research institutions are doing to investigate and deter such practices. Is the system broken, and what can researchers do to help fix it if it is?

As we did for February’s event, we have been posting related content on Of Schemes and Memes and first up we heard from Richard Van Noorden, Assistant News Editor at Nature, giving us an overview of what retractions can tell us about setting the research record straight. In his post he highlights some recent high profile cases of retraction, explaining why retraction rates appear to be increasing:

For suddenly, in the last ten years, retractions have shot up, rising ten- fold while the scientific literature expanded only 44%.  A blog, Retraction Watch, has monitored them over the past 18 months. Recent examples include prominent psychologist Diederik Stapel’s fraud  (particularly shocking because Stapel had such a stellar reputation); the dispute over whether or not chronic fatigue syndrome is linked to a virus ; and the scandal in which cancer geneticist Anil Potti’s flawed research led to patients being enrolled in clinical trials based on faulty data. Those are the ones that made headlines – but as Retraction Watch and Neil Saunders’ live feed of retraction notices on PubMed show, rarely a day goes by where a paper is not being withdrawn. The new norm nowadays is to expect hundreds of retractions, and perhaps that number will continue to rise.

Do stay tuned for more posts and please get in touch if you’d like to contribute anything.

SciBarCamb tickets

April sees the return of SciBarCamb – an unconference for scientists and technologists, taking place on the evening of Friday 20th April and all day on Saturday 21st. The earlybird tickets have now sold out, but there’s another chance to reserve your place from 10am on February 29th.  If you’d like to find out more about the event, read what co-organiser, Eva Amsen has to say about it.

NPG to publish new open access journal CPT

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics (ASCPT) are pleased to announce a new, open access journal. CPT: Pharmacometrics & Systems Pharmacology (CPT:PSP) will launch in fall 2012 and will be hosted here. The journal will be a companion title to Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (CPT) and will be accepting submissions in summer 2012:

CPT:PSP will be a cross-disciplinary journal devoted to publishing original research in advances in quantitative methods as applied in pharmacology, physiology and therapeutics in humans. The common focus will be on quantitative methods that improve an understanding of pharmacology and therapeutics in humans. The editorial team will be led by newly-appointed Editor-in-Chief Pieter H. van der Graaf, PhD, PharmD. The team aims to provide a unique international forum for scientists in the pharmacometrics and systems pharmacology space.

All content will be open access and will be freely available to researchers worldwide through the nature.com platform. You can find out more in the official press release found here.

Tweetups and Facebook

Science tweetups offer opportunities to mix and mingle in person with sciencey friends you may have met online and are also a chance to learn something new. For those interested the next #NYCscitweetup will be held on Thursday 29th March in the Peculier Pub.  Join in from 6:30pm – all welcome! You can also find more NYC events in our NYC Science Communication events calendar that lists this event and others like it.

For those of you interested in science events across the world, you can find a list of our science events calendars here and a Facebook list of science events here. Feel free to let us know what is missing.

To make life easier, we have also created a list of NPG Facebook pages, so make sure you subscribe!

UK Conference of Science Journalists and Science communication events

The UK conference of science journalists will take place this year on June 25th. Their website is now live and earlybird registration is open until the end of March. The keynote will be by Jay Rosen and you can follow the online discussions on the #ukcsj hashtag.

Now onto another science communication focused event, “Scientists and journalists need different things from science. Discuss”. Held at the Royal Institution in London on Tuesday 13th March 7pm , the event will be guest curated by The Guardian’s Alok Jha, with Alice Bell, Chris Chambers and Nature’s Ananyo Bhattacharya as panel members. The session will look at the gulf between what journalists do and what scientists think they should do.

To warm up for Tuesday’s event, you can read Ananyo’s guest blog posts in The Guardian’s Notes and Theories blog: Science journalists should be asking questions and deflating exaggeration and Nine ways scientists demonstrate they don’t understand journalism. If you wish to attend you can find tickets here and do check out the official hash tag #Riscimedia for the online talk.

Communities Happenings – 5th March

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Communities Happenings is a weekly post with news of interest to NPG’s online communities. The aim is to provide this info in one handy summary. Listings include tweetups and conferences which we’re attending and/or organising as well as new online tools, products or cool videos. We also occasionally flag up NPG special offers and competitions plus updates about NPG social media activities such as new accounts you might want to follow. Do let us know what you find most useful!

#LensesonBiology

Last week Nature included an Outlook supplement focusing on Lenses on Biology, to coincide with the launch of Nature’s Education’s Principles of Biology textbook. Featuring overviews of 5 different subject areas by 5 top scientists, we complemented the special on Of Schemes and Memes with 5 blog posts by 5 young scientists at different stages of their careers.

First up was Vince Macri discussing productive failure and cancer research:

Part of my focus this term (Spring 2012) is on the molecular biology of cancer, a field which thrives on collaboration between various disciplines.  Novel drug-delivery systems, medical devices and techniques increasingly allow us to engage with and manipulate the various environments of malignant tumors. For example,  insight into molecular markers expressed frequently or exclusively by cancer cells allows for targeting of nanoparticles and drug conjugates to tumors and tumor vasculature.  Such targeted therapies have the potential to increase the effectiveness and reduce the side effects of drugs to combat cancer.

Researchers Use Gold Nanoparticles as Drug Carrier in New Cancer Treatment

 Next up was PhD student Christie Wilcox revealing her route to grad school:

 Christie Wilcox with a small gecko on her nose

 I got into science for a lot of reasons. I have always loved animals of all shapes and sizes. My childhood desire to gaze upon gecko tongues was just the beginning of a life-long obsession that includes squealing each and every time I hold a baby anything, an inexplicable urge to swim towards dangerous animals instead of away, and compulsively touching the bells of jellyfish. My passion for wildlife is only trumped by my fascination with puzzles. I am excited by the adventure of science, by the idea of stepping out into the universe and discovering something no one else has ever seen or solving a mystery no one else has. 

Post-doc, Holly Bik, taking a slightly more alternative approach to explaining how she enjoys looking for the zen in genomes:

I realised that success requires you to define your own niche. My niche, I’m finding, lies at the intersection of tradition and innovation, using cutting-edge genomics and computational biology to answer longstanding questions about deep-sea ecosystems. The deep-sea is a vast, complicated ecosystem, we know little about the “big picture” and next to nothing about the cellular machinery which breathes life into a specialized and sometimes grotesque fauna.

Unidentified crustacean species inhabiting the Mid-Atlantic ridge surrounding the Charlie-Gibbs Fracture zone in the North Atlantic

Undergrad, Katy Chalmers looks at how combining science and art has helped her to see details she might have otherwise missed:

The field of synthetic biology, which combines science and engineering to come up with new biological systems not found in nature, has many parallels with the relationship that I discovered between science and art. By looking at living systems in new and different ways, synthetic biologists find new ways of seeing the world. Using art to communicate science can do the same. In order to create a cohesive image, the subject material must be looked at from different perspectives. Often these different perspectives can lead to increased knowledge of the subject material, both on the part of the artist and the viewer.

Ornithoptera alexandrae butterfly. 

Finally, high-school student and Scitable blogger, Naseem Syed considers a how her experiences out of the classroom have enhanced her interest within it:

As I advance into my freshman year, I have begun to answer more of my own curiosities: Why do some male animals such as the Blue Footed Booby prance around in a seemingly silly dance? Having studied animal interactions I know their dance is part of a ritualistic mating courtship. Why don’t we look 100% like our parents? The field of genetics helps us understand that DNA is like a shuffled card deck with some probabilities dictated by the genes of our parents. Knowing more about biology helps with everyday life; having studied plant life I now know that the closet isn’t a good place to leave my potted plants and by learning more about climate change, I can understand news stories about global warming and what the consequences mean for our planet.

To continue with the Lenses On Biology discussion, follow the #lensesonbiology hashtag on Twitter, read Nature Job’s summary, or check out Scitable’s Khalil A. Cassimally‘s post, Scientists And Science Students Tell Us Why Science Matters.

UK Conference of Science Journalists

The UK conference of science journalists will take place this year on June 25th. Their website is now live and earlybird registration is open until the end of March. The keynote will be by Jay Rosen and you can follow the online discussions on the #ukcsj hashtag. Nature.com’s Lou Woodley will be helping to coordinate a session focusing on online tools for science journalists, so stay tuned for further information.

Shorty awards – final round

The Nature News team‘s Twitter account has made it to the final round of the Shorty Industry Awards in the category, ‘Best Use of Social Media for News’ for their coverage of Fukushima. This means they are now in competition with CNN, the BBC Breaking News and NBC News/MSNBC Twitter accounts.  They are also up for the science shorty too – so thanks if you have voted for them!

Good luck, News team!

SoNYC

SoNYC is the monthly discussion series that the nature.com Communities team organises in collaboration with Ars Technica and RockefellerUniversity. The event is also live-streamed and archived and we create a round-up post including a Storify storyboard of all the online conversations around the event. February’s event took place on Thursday 16th in partnership with the American Museum of Natural History for Social Media Week and discussed, Beyond a trend: enhancing science communication with social media. The panel included author Carl Zimmer, BBC journalist, Matt Danzico and was moderated by Jennifer Kingson of the New York Times Science section. Write-up, including Storify of the tweets here.

March 20th’s event is a re-scheduling of last October’s event on, Setting the research record straight and features Retraction Watch blogger, Ivan Oransky, John Krueger of the Office of Research Integrity and Liz Williams, Executive Editor of The Journal of Cell Biology.  As we did for February’s event, we will be posting related content on Of Schemes and Memes so stay tuned and please get in touch if you’d like to contribute anything.

Twitter, Facebook and Google +

This week has seen the revival of another NPG account on Twitter: @NatureEDU 

You can also find a full Twitter list of NPG journals and products here.

Nature Reviews and Scientific American Mind  now have their own Facebook pages, so make sure you “like” them.

Finally, there are now 8 NPG Google+ pages and they can all be found in this circle.

SciBarCamb tickets

April sees the return of SciBarCamb – an unconference for scientists and technologists, taking place on the evening of Friday 20th April and all day on Saturday 21st. The earlybird tickets have now sold out, but there’s another chance to reserve your place from 10am on February 29th.  If you’d like to find out more about the event, read what co-organiser, Eva Amsen has to say about it.

Events elsewhere

Our scientific events calendars have been freshly updated to include the latest scientific events. Make sure you check them out. Please do get in touch if we are missing any events or if you would like to contribute to this calendar or any of the other calendars listed below.

London Science Events

Cambridge Science Events

DC Science Events

NYC Sci Comm events

Boston Science Events

San Francisco Science Events

Paris Science Events

 

Communities Happenings – 28th November

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Scientific events in Boston

Boston blogger, Tinker Ready, has been alerting those in the area to a jam-packed week of scientific events and you can keep updated on the latest events by checking out her calendar. This week, she will be focusing her blogging efforts on viruses and she’ll be heading over to the AIDS @ 30 event. Do let us know if you plan to attend any of these events, or if there is anything missing from the calendar.

Don’t forget that we’ve also created Google Calendars for some of the other major science cities: Paris, London and Cambridge in the UK and DC, NYC and San Francisco in the US. Below you can find links to all of the Google Calendars we have put together:

Please do let us know if you can see any important omissions, or if you would like to contribute to any of the calendars.

SONYC!

Join us on Thursday December 8th, in person at Rockefeller University from 7pm EST, or online via our Livestream channel for the seventh SONYC! The topic for discussion will be, Matching medium and messengers to meet the masses.

Reaching an audience that’s already interested in science is relatively straightforward; however, reaching a broader audience can be challenging. Attracting and maintaining an audience outside the core of science enthusiasts requires a carefully crafted match of the medium and messenger. This SONYC will consider when and how scientists and science communicators should seek to highlight science issues to the general public? Should we be ready to respond and correct public misunderstandings or attempt to influence science policy? What material can be handled through social media and what requires a more involved form of engagement, such as a science festival?

The event is free to attend with an opportunity to meet the panellists and other attendees afterwards. If you’d like to follow the vocal online discussion, keep an eye on the #sonyc hashtag or check back here for our write-up and Storify of the online conversations. Do continue to check the official Twitter account for more information.

FameLab

FameLab, set up in 2005 by Cheltenham Science Festival, is the international competition for science communicators and this week the London heats have begun! Kings College London is the venue for the heats, with a winner and a wildcard from each heat making the final next Wednesday. Over the next few days, Nature Network London will feature interviews with the winners and wildcards. First up is wildcard and Imperial PhD student, Edward Yoxall:

How did you become interested in communication and have you ever done anything like this before?

I’ve never done anything like FameLab, but I guess I’ve always enjoyed being on stage. Gives you such a rush! I’ve been working for the BBC on the ‘Bang Goes the Theory’ roadshow as a science demonstrator, so that’s been pretty good practice for speaking in front of crowds. It’s also been good at making me pitch at the right level – finding the balance between complexity and simplicity is definitely one of the hardest parts of the job.

Do keep an eye on the London blog for the remaining interviews.

Nature Outlook: Allergies

The increased prevalence of allergies and asthma, especially in the developed world, has raised the stakes in the quest for prevention and cure. In light of this, the latest Nature Outlook supplement is all about allergies. Nature Network blogger Paige Brown features in the supplement with her article, Atopy: Marching with allergies, where she details her lifelong struggles with allergic disorders and hyper-reactivity:

My mother, herself allergy-prone, remembers my inflamed and itchy skin lesions in infancy. These are classic symptoms of atopic eczema, better known in the United States as atopic dermatitis. Then, in my toddler years, as my father recounts, I started to show “this peculiar reaction” around animals, scratching at my throat as my eyes went red, watery and swollen. These typical symptoms of allergic rhinitis, or hay fever, owe their origins to human immune-system responses to specific protein allergens, for example those found in animal dander:

You can read the whole, free supplement here.

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#Scitweetups

Science Tweetups are a great way to meet local scientists and science communicators for an evening of chitchat in the pub. There are now regular tweetups in NYC ( #NYCscitweetup, ) Cambridge, UK ( #camscitweetup ) and Washington DC (#DCscitweetup. )

The sixth #NYCSciTweetup is on Thursday 1st December at the Peculier Pub. Join in from 6.30pm onwards.

On the other side of the Atlantic, there is also a pre-Xmas #ukscitweetup in London; here’s the doodle poll where you can vote for your preferred dates. To find out who else is attending, watch the #ukscitweetup hashtag on Twitter.

It is question time

This week NatureNews have been asking via their brand new Facebook page, “Who owns your lab notebook?” In response to a legal dispute about missing notebooks in Nevada, some have wondered whether most working scientists even know who technically owns their lab notebooks. So, for the working scientists out there, is it clear that the research notes you take generally belong to the institution you work for? You can respond to their FB poll here and make sure you “like” them to keep updated on the latest news.

For those interested in Nature’s other social media presences, we also have a Twitter list cataloguing all of our NPG Twitter accounts and we also have a Google + circle featuring all the NPG Google+ pages. This circle will be continuously updated as and when accounts are created.