... ensure that the results of science are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world, in a fashion that conveys their significance for knowledge, culture and daily life ... (from Nature's original mission statement)

I'll skip the PR blurb in favour of some good old fashion techie bullet points:

• Nature Blogs is a blogroll of good quality science blogs (quality is a relative term, but there's no spam or pseudoscience and little press release regurgitation)
• To get onto the blogroll you need to submit your blog
• You can log in to the site with your Network or nature.com username and password then claim any blogs that you own.
• The blogroll is moderated by the community (once you've submitted and claimed a blog you get to vote on submissions)
• To be included in link backs from articles you need to be on the blogroll
• It uses Scintilla to aggregate posts from all of the blogs on the blogroll
• then clusters them into stories - groups of related posts.
• We're trying out Twitter as an alternate view on the stories data - if you follow the NatureBlogs user then a couple of times a week it'll point you to particularly interesting stories you might have missed. You can also find twittering bloggers by watching NatureBlogs' following list.
• It uses Connotea's WebCite web service to work out what links in posts are to scientific articles.

We're just getting started and there'll be more developments as other aspects of NPG's blogging strategy come together.

The next release in a couple of weeks will focus on usability issues and bugs - we know there are a few! - and on the API, which I hope you'll find useful in your own sites and mashups. Some undocumented previews (schemas and content are liable to change):

• download blogroll in CSV format for your own projects
• link to page of posts talking about the paper with DOI 10.1136/bmj.a1938
• that data in JSON format
• and in Atom

I'm keen to hear any criticisms, bug reports and feature requests - as blog readers you are the target audience after all - so do feel free to email me on blogs@nature.com or direct message natureblogs on Twitter with your feedback!

Posted by Euan Adie at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Postgenomic trackbacks ()

We and our partners at the U.S National Cancer Institute recently had an article describing our Pathway Interaction Database accepted by Nucleic Acids Research. I'm not posting to puff that up: during the submission process, the NAR editors raised a couple of perfectly reasonable questions about preprints and unique identifiers.

We had previously put a preprint of the article in Nature Precedings. We've now updated that article to point to the final peer-reviewed version -- and, as you'd hope, the NAR editors were happy with that. There's a general point in that:
we encourage all authors to update their articles in Nature Precedings to point to new versions subsequently published elsewhere.

The NAR editors also raised a question about unique identifiers. Many journal publishers assign CrossRef-managed Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to published articles. The DOI for our NAR article, for example, is 10.1093/nar/gkn653. In Nature Precedings, we also assign unique identifiers but have chosen those managed by Handle.net to avoid any complications/confusion caused by two versions of the same article having different or the same DOI. The Handle for our Nature Precedings article, then, is 10101/npre.2008.2243.1.

I think a large fraction of the scientific research community doesn't know about DOIs and other unique identifiers. They prefer to stick to traditional journal citations and PubMed IDs -- either not knowing or not caring that PubMed IDs aren't, strictly speaking, a stable identifier for the actual research article. DOIs are now a standard of the publishing industry, and authors are increasingly likely to need to understand what they are and how to use them.

Posted by Matt Day at 08:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Postgenomic trackbacks ()

To its huge credit, the British Library (just up the road from Nature's London office) has begun to host a series of discussion-oriented meetings about science called, appropriately enough, TalkScience.

At last week's meeting, provocatively entitled 'Scientific Researchers and Web 2.0: Social Not Working?', there was a great turnout, not only at the BL but also on Second Nature, our island in Second Life, which was hooked up to the real world with audio and video connections. (Thanks to my colleagues, Alf Eaton and Jo Scott, and to BL staff, for making this happen.)

I gave a brief opening talk, my notes for which are reproduced below. There's further discussion, from both before and after the event, on Nature Network.

"Social Not Working?" »

Posted by Timo Hannay at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | Postgenomic trackbacks ()

Earlier this month I gave a talk at the 'Science in the 21st Century' meeting at the Perimeter Institute in Ontario and a couple of days later at the ALPSP International Conference 2008. They were basically the same talk, though one was tailored for scientists and the other for publishers. Some people were kind enough to say that they enjoyed it, so I'm posting my notes and slides here. This isn't exactly what I said because I tend to deviate a bit from my script, but the gist of it is the same.

The individual slides are embedded below, but if you want the full set then here they are: PDF (23MB, no animation), Apple Keynote (25MB, animated).

"The Future Is A Foreign Country" »

Posted by Timo Hannay at 07:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | Postgenomic trackbacks ()

Yesterday we launched a new structural biology website, the PSI-Nature Structural Genomics Knowledgebase.

The site is a great addition to our existing collection of Gateways and Databases. The project is a collaboration with the Protein Structure Initiative, a large scale NIH-funded consortium to develop and apply high-throughput techniques for protein structure determination. They've been highly successful in generating new technologies that are available for others to use, and they've shown that structure determination work can be scaled up significantly.

Now that the site is launched, we'll be providing monthly editorial updates that put developments in structural work into context for a wide range of biomedical researchers -- for a little more about that read our press release.

The website is hosted at Rutgers University by the same team that hosts one of most significant and long-established databases, the Protein Data Bank, and we're very pleased to be working them.

Posted by Matt Day at 07:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Postgenomic trackbacks ()