This weekly Nautilus column highlights some of the online discussion at Nature Network in the preceding week that is of relevance to scientists as authors.
The Nature Network week column is archived here.
Barbara Axt, at her blog Baxt, asks how Internet videos can be used in science communication and science journalism. The subseqent discussion ranges over podcasts, movies of protocols, and videos of experiments as training aids.
In the good paper journal club, Neil Blair Christensen describes his journal’s new project, Journal of Diabetes Forum, in which an editorial team offers to help researchers formulate their study designs before they submit manuscripts to journals for peer review, providing “no strings” editorial feedback on study designs. The service aims to help a growing group of new researchers get some good paper basics right and optimize their chances of surviving triage and peer review once they do submit to a journal. After feedback, researchers are free to submit to any journal they wish. For more details, please see the Nature Network forum.
A discussion at Richard Grant‘s blog The Scientist has blossomed into an example of how networking using the Internet, and Nature Network in particular, can help scientists. Sebastian Gonzalez, a Masters’ student from Chile, “a little country at the end of the world” containing not many scientists, entered the conversation because he is interested in web-based collaboration but thinks it doesn’t work for some stated reasons. Some inches later, he has changed his position, thanks to a Chile-Australia-UK-Finland-Switzerland five-way sharing of information and ideas.
“A paper came across my virtual desk the other day that’s got Instant Classic written all over it.” Nature editor Henry Gee reacts to a rather special submission: “Without giving anything away, it’s a genuinely new and startlingly simple insight into a problem that’s been perplexing people for ages; backed up by a novel, simple and apocalyptically powerful new technique; written like a dream; and from (now get this) a single author. I’m bound not to say any more. Indeed, I might have said too much. But this is one of those papers that gave me gooseflesh and threw my editorial spidey sense into fibrillation; one of those lightning-from-a-clear-sky manuscripts that as an editor I have the opportunity and privilege to be able to read and review perhaps once in a decade, and make me feel glad to be able to do the job I do. When I look at a manuscript and can’t decide whether I should send it to review or not, I ask myself one question, in particular: does this manuscript have the potential to make me see the world in a completely new way? This one does. Oh boy, it does.”
In the wake of the annual Society for Scholarly Publishing, Nature Network editor Corie Lok asks whether it is the role of a scholarly society to be setting up and running groups on Nature Network or Facebook, or even building their own networking site?
Meandering Scholar (Ian Brooks) tells us what it is really like to be a mentor, and raises a toast to a first data point.