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.
A detailed dissection of the new J. Biol. (a journal published by BioMed Central) policy of allowing authors to publish papers after one round of review without making the changes requested by the reviewers is provided by Noah Gray, himself an editor at Nature. After summarizing the arguments for and against this system, Noah comes down against it – as, in the main, do those who comment on the post.
“Who will be science’s Oprah?”, asks Craig Rowell. Al Gore, Anderson Cooper, Alan Alda and Julie Roberts are considered but found wanting. Where are the spokesmen and women for science in the Obama era, to add some charisma and glamour? Not many nominations as yet – David Suzuki being one of the few. Do you have any good suggestions? If not, you can always join Jennifer Rohn and find out how to apply to be a scientific film star.
In the meantime, Brian Derby checks out his progress in another kind of ‘science pop’ chart – providing a commentary on which papers are climbing and which falling in the Web of Science citation index – as well as experiencing some bemusement as to why. Yet another indicator of the impossibility of ‘quality metrics’?
“Why is science important?”, ponders Henry Gee. For him, not because it is useful, or for what it has allowed us to discover, but because of how it frames what we have not found out yet. An amusing Hilbert’s list follows.
Martin Fenner, on the other hand, has been busy interviewing Kevin Emamy of Cite-U-Like, a social bookmarking service for scientists.
If you blog about peer-reviewed research on Nature Network, you can now submit your posts to researchblogging. org, a website that aggregates blog posts about peer-reviewed research. Bloggers simply need to register their blog with the site and then submit individual posts. Full details from Corie Lok, Nature Network’s Editor.
And in further Nature Network news, there is now a ‘hub’ dedicated to New York City, offering a dedicated blog, forum, jobs and event listings for the city’s thriving scientific community. “We decided to launch a hub in New York because, of all the local communities using Nature Network, the NYC one has been the largest and most active,” says Corie Lok. “For the past nine months, New York scientists have been meeting monthly in pubs to socialize and network, and it’s all been organized and advertised through Nature Network.” Two Columbia University-based scientists are helping to bring the community together: Caryn Shechtman, a fourth-year graduate student, and Barry Hudson, an associate research scientist, blog about scientific life in the city, by covering scientific events, writing about local research, and profiling local researchers.
Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Nature.com’s science blogs index and tracker
Nature Network’s many blogs and forums