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.
The pros and cons of that most informal kind of scientific authorship, blogging, have been mulled over again at Nature Network during the past week. Katherine Haxton summarizes a talk she has just given with the title “Can science blogging enhance your research life?”, briefly describing the history of the medium, explaining what a blog is, and identifying several uses of blogging, including researchblogging.org , Jean-Claude Bradley’s Useful Molecules , Nature Network and Rosie Redfield’s Research blogs (links are in Katherine’s post, together with a link to her slide presentation). Eva Amsen is similarly preparing a talk and asks Nature Network users what they think are the benefits of blogging to scientists. Some very interesting discussion ensues. I think the clearest contribution to this particular conversation in favour of blogging is from Katherine: “scientists must do better at outreach and communication. Scientists must lower the barriers between their profession and the rest of society. Scientists must get their own positive publicity and information out there because no one else is doing it for us. Blogging is a means of engaging with a wider scientific audience.” Indeed, researchers should blog more than they do, according to an Editorial in Nature this week, subject of further discussion at the Nature Opinion forum on Nature Network.
Moving on from blogs but remaining online, Caryn Shechtman reports on a panel session at Columbia University on whether open science is good for research. Open science holds that all data are free and public; and that results and methods can be portrayed in various web-based media. Although there are risks, the consensus of the Columbia panel was that open science has many more advantages than disadvantages, both of which are described further by Caryn in her post, and addressed in the discussion that follows.
Another topic of perennial interest to scientists as authors is that of how their work is cited and how those citations are measured and used to assess their performance. Noah Gray provides an entertaining response, in the form of an intereview with Dr Obvious, to a recent study on the effect of “open access” publication on citation rates. And the advantages and disadvantages of tagging one’s citations and libraries are throroughly dissected by Thomas Kluyver in the citation in science forum, and in the web 2.0 forum, in which opposing views expressed in blog posts by David Crotty and William Gunn are featured.
A post in the Nature Publishing Group News forum notes that the first papers in the company’s latest journal, Nature Chemistry, are now published online (AOP). Via this forum post, you can read an account by the Chief Editor of the journal, Stuart Cantrill, describing why NPG is launching Nature Chemistry, how the journal might affect the chemistry publishing community, his vision for the journal, how it might be different from other chemistry journals, and more. A free sample copy of the journal can be ordered at the Nature Chemistry website, where you can also submit your work to the journal, and find out more information and news about what’s in store when the first printed issue is available in April.
Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Nature.com’s science blogs index and tracker