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.
Martin Fenner, founding president of the Good Paper Journal Club, notes that Vineet Sharma, who joined last week, is the 250th member. This Nature Network group started in March 2008 and had 100 members by May. Martin writes: “We had a number of interesting discussions with close to 50 messages and 36 recommended papers in the Connotea archive.” All are welcome to join the group, to post examples of what you consider to be well-written papers, and to join the discussion about what makes a scientific description widely accessible and stimulating. Terminology, of course, is one serious hampering factor in this regard. In a group discussion of a paper on ‘natural killer’ cells, Linda Cooper is “struck, however, by the use of words such as “natural killer cells”. They sound scary and dangerous. Moreover, these cells have “self-renewing ‘memory’” (a very human concept) that is transferred into “naive” animals that respond with a “viral challenge”. (What is the opposite of “naive” I wonder, and would ‘response’ be more precise and less human-like than “challenge”?) While such terminology may make a story more exciting it could also have unintended consequences.”
For those scientists who branch out as book authors, or who enjoy reading books about science written for a general readership, Angela Sani says that although she loves reading such books, many of them are dense, extremely long and can become boring. She asks Nature Network users to recommend some of their favourite gripping, narrative non-fiction science writing. There are plenty of well-known and not-so-well known suggestions and meta-suggestions, sufficient for about a year of reading at least, I would think.
Nature Network celebrated its second birthday on 14 February last week – a memorial that went relatively (but not entirely) un-noticed, possibly because of the Darwin frenzy and other less scientific but no doubt distracting celebrations (Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennary and St Valentine’s day). One person who noticed is Andrew Sun, who began his Nature Network blog in the early days of the platform, and here reflects on the past two years writing it. Before joining Nature Network, his main blogging activity was writing about scientific papers. Once he found himself with a ready-made audience of scientists, however, he decided to write with the perspective of being in China, and whether events he observed and experienced there were mirrored in other users’ (not from China) experience. Soon he found his answer, and returned to writing about scientific papers, but notes that such posts do not attract many comments.
As well as founding and running the Good Paper Journal Club, Martin Fenner also blogs at Nature Network about scientific publishing in the digital age. I strongly recommend his blog to all scientists, as many new tools are discussed and their developers interviewed. One such interview featured last week: Geoffrey Bilder of Crossref , an organization best known for managing dois, or digital object identifiers, by which journal articles are uniquely recognized online. On this occasion, however, the conversation is about author identity. Would it be possible for scientists themselves each to have a identifier so they can be unequivocally associated with their papers? (This is an important question, for example, for Asian scientists who share a relatively small pool of surnames, or when one considers the amount of duplications and name/address errors in abstracting and indexing databases of papers.) The question of author identifiers is by no means simple, and the interview with Geoffrey Bilder provides an informative outline of some key aspects, complete with links to further information and discussion.
Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Nature.com’s science blogs index and tracker