Special focus on genome instability

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The March issue of Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology presents a web focus on genome instability. The integrity of the genome is crucial for tumour suppression and for the propagation of genomic information to subsequent generations. DNA damage can result from cellular metabolism, exogenous genotoxic agents or routine errors in DNA replication and recombination. To combat these attacks and maintain genome integrity, cells have evolved a response system that induces cell cycle arrest, allowing sufficient time for DNA repair by specialized proteins. The DNA damage response system activates the appropriate DNA repair pathway or, in the case of irreparable damage, induces apoptosis. The special focus contains research highlights, review articles, a journal club and a NPG library of related articles. There is also a brief editors’ summary of the contents.

Accompanying the same issue of Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology is a Poster, by Eric J. Bennett, Mathew E. Sowa and J. Wade Harper, which illustrates the different deubiquitinating enzyme (DUB) families and highlights the cellular pathways in which some DUB-associated complexes act. Download a copy here.

Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology journal home page.

About the journal.

All Nature Reviews journals in the life and clinical sciences.

Making your mark on the journal cover

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The Editorial in the March issue of Nature Chemistry (2, 147; 2010) provides some advice for authors keen to feature on the cover of a Nature journal. From the Editorial:

Journal covers provide a convenient focal point for the content that lies inside them and are often used in marketing campaigns — whether in simple adverts, or as posters and calendars. It is not only the publisher that benefits, however, and it is quite common to see journal covers feature prominently on slides during talks or on the walls of offices and corridors in academic institutions. They are a source of pride and may also offer increased exposure to a group of researchers and their work.

Although the era of print might be drawing to a close, the idea of collating articles into manageable portions — whether linked in time or by subject area — is one that may persist for some time. And for as long as it does, there will be a case for grouping such collections together under a banner of some sort; one that will undoubtedly draw on artwork associated with its content. Paper journals may disappear, but the concept of a cover may not.

At Nature Chemistry, the cover image of a particular issue is generally one of the last few items to be finalized before we go to press. Once we have decided on which articles will go into an issue, we take a closer look at the suggestions sent to us by their authors. Although we do applaud the optimism and/or confidence of those who submit cover art at the time of initial submission of a manuscript, we generally encourage authors to supply us with cover suggestions once we know that their paper will be accepted for publication.

Beauty is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, and what may look like a stunning piece of creative artistry to one individual, might not make others feel the same way. What counts at Nature Chemistry is that you impress the editorial and production teams, who all get to have their say — and, in particular, the art editor. It’s often best to keep things simple and we encourage those in a position to submit cover art suggestions to look at the sort of images that we’ve featured in the past. Throwing together composite images with lots of different objects styled in different ways on a somewhat arbitrary background just doesn’t do it for us. Send us striking images, with no Nature Chemistry logo and no cover lines.

Once the cover image is decided, the final step of the process involves the editorial team thinking up some occasionally witty, but always informative, cover lines that will hopefully grab the readers’ attention. Occasionally the lines are obvious, others come in a flash of inspiration, and some are a challenge that turns into a lengthy chore that frustrates for hours or days. As with the artwork itself, some turn out to be better than others. Finally, a brief description of the cover art is written by the editor handling the paper that triumphed in the battle to be on the cover, and this finds its way on to the table of contents.

Finally, we’d just like to note that we do not charge for cover images, and nor do we ask for a contribution towards the cost of the cover. Images are chosen for their aesthetic appeal and not on whether an author can afford to pay — after all, we need to put something on the outside cover of the journal! Similarly, the choice to feature a particular article on the cover of the journal does not imply that we think it is better than the other papers in the issue — we believe everything we publish to be outstanding! It really does come down to what we judge to be the most striking image.

Nature Chemistry journal website.

Nature Chemistry guide to authors.

How Nature selects papers for publication

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This is a shortened version of an editorial in Nature ( 463, 850; 2010 ; free to read online).

One myth that never seems to die is that Nature‘s editors seek to inflate the journal’s impact factor by sifting through submitted papers (some 16,000 last year) in search of those that promise a high citation rate. We don’t. Not only is it difficult to predict what a paper’s citation performance will be, but citations are an unreliable measure of importance. Take two papers in synthetic organic chemistry, both published in June 2006. One, ‘Control of four stereocentres in a triple cascade organocatalytic reaction’ (D. Enders et al. Nature 441, 861–863; 2006), had acquired 182 citations by late 2009, and was the fourth most cited chemistry paper that we published that year. Another, ‘Synthesis and structural analysis of 2-quinuclidonium tetrafluoroborate’ (K. Tani and B. M. Stoltz Nature 441, 731–734; 2006), had acquired 13 citations over the same period. Yet the latter paper was highlighted as an outstanding achievement in Chemical and Engineering News, the magazine of the American Chemical Society.

Indeed, the papers we publish with citations in the tens greatly outnumber those in the 100s, although it is the latter that dominate our impact factor. We are proud of our full spectrum.

Another long-standing myth is that we allow one negative referee to determine the rejection of a paper. On the contrary, there were several occasions last year when all the referees were underwhelmed by a paper, yet we published it on the basis of our own estimation of its worth. That internal assessment has always been central to our role; Nature has never had an editorial board. Our editors spend several weeks a year in scientific meetings and labs, and are constantly reading the literature. Papers selected for review are seen by two or more referees. The number of referees is greater for multidisciplinary papers. We act on any technical concerns and we value the referees’ opinions about a paper’s potential significance or lack thereof. But we make the final call on the basis of criteria such as the paper’s depth of mechanistic insight, or its value as a data resource or in enabling applications of an innovative technique.

At the same time, we operate on the strict principle that our decisions are not influenced by the identity or location of any author. Almost all our papers have multiple authors, often from several countries. And we commonly reject papers whose authors happen to include distinguished or ‘hot’ scientists.

Yet another myth is that we rely on a small number of privileged referees in any given discipline. In fact, we used nearly 5,400 referees last year, and are constantly recruiting more — especially younger researchers with hands-on expertise in newer techniques. We use referees from around the scientifically developed world, whether or not they have published papers with us, and avoid those with a track record of slow response. And in highly competitive areas, we will usually follow authors’ requests and our own judgement in avoiding referees with known conflicts of interest.

Myths about journals will continue to proliferate. We can only attempt to ensure that the processes characterized above remain as robust and objective as possible, in our perpetual quest to deliver to our readers the best science that we can muster.

Editors’ advice on writing scientific papers

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Nature Structural & Molecular Biology (17, 139 ;2010) provides some writing advice for scientists: “less is more when it comes to writing a good scientific paper. Tell a story in clear, simple language and keep in mind the importance of the ‘big picture’.”

Editors and reviewers regularly have to slog through papers that seem to go on forever and, more dishearteningly, have the main points and interesting bits inexplicably hidden, when they assess them for possible publication. NSMB provides some pointers, a few of which are provided here:

Tell a story. We all love listening to a good story. And we all tell stories, but some are better at it than others, and those who tell the best stories are most able to get their points across. How you got your data is not that important—we don’t need a chronology (first we did this, then we did that, etc.). Instead, now that you have the data and have interpreted them a certain way, think about how best to tell a story in light of all the previous work in the field, the question(s) you are addressing and why that question is important. How do your results advance our understanding of the question(s)? Have you discovered something new or unexpected? Consider how your findings fit into the broader context of the field, whether they are likely to change the way people in the field will think about the topic and how they will drive further experiments in the future.

Be clear. Making your story clear is not the same thing as dumbing it down. No reviewer has ever said that a paper was too easy to read. We do, however, get complaints from reviewers about how complicated, convoluted or downright confusing a paper is. Clear, simple language allows the data and their interpretation to come through. Remember that clarity is especially important when you are trying to get complicated ideas across. Keep the jargon to a minimum and explain the terms you do use. When you’re done, give your paper to a scientist outside your field and ask that person to read it for clarity. He or she will be able to point out all the remaining jargon, whether the experimental design, results and data interpretation are clear and how interesting your paper is to someone working in another area.

Provide an informative title and abstract. PubMed allows one to search through ~19 million citations, and Table of Contents e-alerts bring you the latest from your favorite journals. And what do you see when your e-alert arrives or your search is complete?—the title and abstract. Most people will stop there without reading any further, so don’t blow it with a boring title. Make the abstract clear and try to get the ‘big picture’ across. Do not get bogged down in details. As an author, this is also your chance to draw your readers in, to entice them to read on. If the title and abstract are comprehensible to only a handful of people directly in your field, you have greatly narrowed the potential readership of your paper.

NSMB journal website.

Nature journals’ advice on how to write a scientific paper, which provides links to several independent resources.

How to get published in a Nature journal.

Nature Medicine on access to and integrity of data

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Everybody agrees that ensuring the integrity and accessibility of research data is crucial for scientific progress. Agreeing on the best way to do so is the hard part, says Nature Medicine in its February Editorial ( 16, 131; 2010).

Technological advances have enabled researchers to tackle questions that involve generating vast amounts of data, posing challenges concerning data analysis, manipulation, annotation, sharing and storage that researchers, institutions, funders and journals have not yet fully grasped. How should data be annotated before being stored in a database so that it can be as useful as possible to other researchers? Should data-sharing requirements be extended to the computer codes that were used to analyze the data? Who should have access to the data, and who pays for data storage and management?

These questions will become more pressing as further technological advances make it even easier to produce ever larger data sets, and it won’t be simple come up with the answers. The US National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine published a report called Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age, focusing on data integrity, access and long-term preservation, and providing a useful framework around which to organize what has become an urgent dialogue.

The conclusions of the report, while worthy, are hardly news to those who have pondered these issues. At the Nature journals, for example, data sharing has long been a requirement for publication, and the editors directly insist to authors that they must fulfill their commitment to sharing when other researchers have reported difficulty in obtaining data and materials. The merit of the acadamies’ report does not lie in its recommendations but in its disciplined analysis of the current state of play, its multidisciplinary perspective on the problems and its identification of the tough questions that scientists, institutions, funders and journals need to answer to move forward, even though it provides little in terms of answers.

The Editorial goes on to further analyse the issues raised by the report, concluding that scientists themselves should develop the right standards, lobby for the resources to set up the appropriate infrastructure and decide on the right measures to deter other scientists from data mismanagement. Data may not be the legal property of scientists, but looking after the data is certainly their responsibility.

Nature Medicine journal website.

Nature journals’ policy on availability of data and materials.

Nanotechnology and food

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The food industry will only reap the benefits of nanotechnology if issues related to safety are addressed and companies are more open about what they are doing. This ethical question is addressed by Nature Nanotechology in its February Editorial (5, 89; 2010), an excerpt from which follows.

So far nanotechnology has largely escaped becoming ‘the next GM’ — which is shorthand for the rejection of genetically modified food by the public in the UK and elsewhere in Europe — but this has largely been because many applications of nanotechnology have been inherently non-controversial: who can object to stain-free trousers or faster computers? The popularity of products such as the iPod Nano has also helped with public acceptance of nanotechnology, even to the extent that distinctly non-nano products — such as the Tata Nano car — have sought to exploit the ‘nano’ brand. However, the introduction of nanomaterials into food and food packaging is a completely different matter, involving important factors that do not arise when developing new materials or electronic devices.

Nanotechnology could benefit the food industry and consumers in two main ways: by using engineered nanomaterials to reduce the amount of fat, salt or sugar in food without changing its taste; and by developing new packaging that keeps food fresher for longer and, possibly, tells the consumer if the food inside has gone off. Improved packaging might also allow more foods to be stored under ambient conditions, rather than in fridges and freezers, thus reducing energy consumption.

However, as made clear in a new report by the House of Lords’ Science and Technology Committee, there are relatively few foods (probably just two products) containing engineered nanomaterials on the market at present. There could be as many as 400 companies around the world are researching possible applications of nanotechnology in food and food packaging — and many of them don’t want their customers to know about this. The House of Lords’ committee says that it is “regrettable” that “far from being transparent about its activities, the food industry was refusing to talk about its work in this area.” While acknowledging that the food industry is afraid that the public might react negatively to food and food packaging that contains engineered nanomaterials, the Lords’ committee argues that “this is exactly the type of behaviour which may bring about the public reaction which it is trying to avert.”

Nanotechnology has much to offer to the food industry, and this report has much to offer food manufacturers, government, funding agencies and regulators.

Nature Nanotechnology journal website.

A climate of constructive communication

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February’s Editorial in Nature Reports Climate Change looks over the past two months, an unnerving time for the international climate community. Once seen as one of the most esteemed scientific organizations in the world, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has suffered some serious blows to its reputation.

First, ‘Climategate’ saw thousands of emails obtained illegally from the University of East Anglia posted on the Internet. Carefully timed ahead of international climate policy negotiations, the emails showed apparent attempts by a handful of IPCC climatologists to withhold data from climate deniers and to exclude contentious information from the panel’s report. Unsurprisingly, this cast doubt on the credibility of the UN body.

In addition, over the past month, the panel has admitted that a key statistic quoted in its 2007 report — that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 — was in error, and its source of dubious origin.

These unfortunate events do not call into question the evidence that warming is unequivocal and that human activity is the primary cause. But they undoubtedly create confusion among the public at a time, post-Copenhagen, when the world now lacks a unified vision of the way forward for climate policy.

For the IPCC, the challenge is clear. Faced with political inertia and denialism, they must communicate their results clearly and their message constructively. The 2007 report — and the Summary for Policymakers in particular — represented a giant leap forward for science communication. For the next report — due out in 2013 — the challenge will be greater still. In trying to understand the climate system more fully, scientists could reveal greater uncertainty about the range of possible climate outcomes. At the same time, policymakers and the public will demand greater certainty so that they can plan accordingly. The climate research community recognizes this problem. Now it must make a priority of addressing it.

See also: Climate of suspicion, Editorial (free to read online) in Nature 463, 269 (2010).

Nature Reports Climate Change homepage

Nature Reports Climate Change current issue.

Climate Feedback, the NRCC blog.

Science books to inspire new generations

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Five leading writers of science books are offering advice for budding authors in a series of interviews running from 4 Feb to 4 March in Nature‘s Books & Arts section. Researchers should be recognized for writing books to convey and develop science, according to an Editorial in Nature last week ( 463, 588; 4 February 2010, free to read online). Here is an extract:

“As the era of the electronic book dawns, perhaps hastened by Apple’s much-touted iPad, researchers should prime themselves to take advantage of the spacious book format. Unlike a tweet, blog or research paper, a good book offers space to breathe, to contemplate complex ideas and to convey a mode of thinking. But most scientists don’t think of writing one, and, if they do, they do it in secret.

In the hope that this might change, Nature last week began a series of weekly interviews with science book authors in its Books & Arts section, collected into a Web focus. Peter Atkins reveals the hard work behind a successful textbook; Carl Zimmer highlights how passion is essential for popular science; David Brin will reveal that criticism improves fiction writing; Georgina Ferry will share research tips for biographies; and Joanna Cole will explain how to convey science to children.

The role of textbooks in handing down the tenets of disciplines is changing as online components take over from printed text. Atkins acknowledges that the extra effort of producing layers of educational material for the web today makes writing a textbook daunting. Most researchers, he admits, would not be able to devote so much time to translating their work for students. Covering broad core subjects such as general chemistry would be nigh on impossible to do in snatched moments. He is lucky that, following his publishing success, his department supported his shift to full-time writing and teaching. Many would see their careers set back if their research was displaced.

Beyond textbooks, the human side of research deserves exposure as much as it ever has, through popular science accounts, biography and fiction. Although the publishing markets today apply a narrow filter, future readers can expect to enjoy access to a wider range of topics through e-books, which are easier to distribute and lack the overheads of print. As a specialist area, science stands to benefit.

Rather than limit scientific discourse to curt journal papers, researchers should embrace the book as another means of expressing not only their insights but also their visions. Through the various styles of writing, all aspects of science can be explored and laid out for posterity and learning. The expansiveness of a book allows sophisticated arguments to be put forward and widely debated; new ideas that cross disciplinary boundaries can more readily be shared and worked through.

But if this exhortation is to have any traction, the effort and skill required to write a book needs to be rewarded in the career recognition of scientists who devote time to mastering the art to good effect — a recognition that is commonplace in the social sciences and humanities. It is time to bring the book back into the science mainstream. This needn’t be a mass movement: just a dedicated few, but more of them, could fulfil the reasonable hope that their books will inspire a new generation. And they should be encouraged to do so."

Nature Web focus: how to write a science book. Selected content is free to read online during February.

Nature Events directory available as free digital edition

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This year’s Nature events directory is now available as a digital edition.

Nature events is the premier resource for scientists looking for the latest scientific conferences, courses, meetings and symposia. It is an essential reference guide to scientific events worldwide: for delegates discussing hot issues and opinion, through to networking and collaboration, events provide a platform for learning and advancement. To help plan which events to attend in the year ahead, Nature events publish an annual directory of global scientific events in the last Nature issue of every year. The annual Nature events Directory is also available as a print supplement and a useful digital edition that is free to download on natureevents.com.

Looking for science events? Start your search now

Looking to promote an event? Find out more in the Event Organizers section of the Nature events website, or contact your Regional Representative

See also: Nature conferences.

Dimensions of scientific diplomacy

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As scientists working in a range of disciplines come under fire in some sections of the media, Nature Physics in its February Editorial (6, 75; 2010) explains why science diplomacy matters.

The Inter-Academy Panel (IAP) counts 103 of the world’s scientific academies as members, most recently the Academies of Science of Afghanistan, Mozambique and Nicaragua, and assembles once every three or four years to discuss issues, like climate change, biodiversity or nuclear proliferation, of global significance that hinge crucially on scientific knowledge, and the gaps in that scientific knowledge.

The Nature Physics editorial continues: “The IAP initiative is typical of the approach espoused in a newly published report, ”https://royalsociety.org/New-frontiers-in-science-diplomacy">New Frontiers in Science Diplomacy: Navigating the Changing Balance of Power, which summarizes a two-day meeting organized last year by the Royal Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The report stresses the vital role of science diplomacy in the modern world in three ‘dimensions’: science in diplomacy, diplomacy for science, and science for diplomacy. The first of these relates to the obvious need for scientific advice and evidence to underpin international negotiations or developments, a prominent example being the work of the existing Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Diplomacy for science recognizes that “science can be a bridge to communities where political ties are weaker, but to develop relationships in these areas, scientists may require diplomatic assistance, whether in contract negotiations, intellectual property agreements or dealing with visa regulations.”

Finally, science for diplomacy acknowledges the ‘soft power’ of science, as a national asset and a universal good — and exemplified by the founding of CERN in post-war, divided Europe. Following the CERN model is the current project to build the synchrotron SESAME in Jordan, as a partnership between several Middle Eastern countries including Israel, Iran and the Palestinian Authority. Indeed the further development of scientific partnerships with the Middle East and the wider Islamic world is identified in the report as a priority for science diplomacy."

Nature Physics journal website.