Trading Knowledge

Dating seems a bit old-fashioned these days, but mandating is becoming more and more popular, though it has to be admitted that there plenty of people who do not love it.
I went to an interesting event on Friday called Research in the open: How mandates work in practice. It was organised by the RIN (Research Information Network) and the RSP (Repositories Support Project) and provided a good overview of trends in open access policies and research. Open access mandates are part of the research environment now, though one speaker preferred to call them “requirements” as that has a softer ring to it.
I was impressed by the amount of work that the Wellcome Trust have done, outlined by Robert Kiley, in helping their funded authors to comply with the Wellcome mandate. Firstly of course they have taken the lead in establishing UK PubMedCentral as a repository for biomedical research. They have taken a generous approach to providing open access fees, though mysteriously excepting their own Sanger Institute from this provision. They have also put much effort into smoothing the process by negotiating with publishers, and ensuring that open access options are available for most journals that their funded research might get published in. Despite all this effort they are still seeing only about 35% compliance. Other funders should take note – if you are not prepared to do the leg work with publishers and do not provide the funds to pay OA fees where necessary then you should not expect high compliance.
I do know of one institute that has achieved closer to 60% compliance with their funder’s mandate. That has been achieved again by hard work, this time by the institute’s librarian. Later in the day Bill Hubbard, manager of the SHERPA project, pointed out that all the UK research-intensive universities (members of the Russell Group or the 1994 group) now have an institutional repository. The people managing these repositories are ideally placed, he suggested, to work with research funders to improve compliance. He suggested that funders should provide repository managers with information about grant-holders in their institution for a start. I agree there is a gap that needs to be bridged between research funders and institutional library or repository managers. One of my problems with UKPMC is its lack of any institutional perspective, so it is not easy to view all authors from your institution or all papers from your institution. Robert Kiley mentioned that UKPMC and the National Library of Medicine (the original begetters of PubMedCentral) are working to tag papers with institutional metadata, so that’s a start. This will help institutional repositories to harvest relevant papers from UKPMC. Bill Hubbard did suggest that perhaps UKPMC should instead harvest papers from institutional repositories, but that didn’t go down well.
We also heard that publishers actions can improve mandate compliance, Elsevier introduced an improved workflow for author submissions and have seen increased take-up of their author-pays option. It’s not really surprising that if you make it easier for authors to understand what to do then they will do it.
It would of course be lovely if all publishers had the same policy but that is not a realistic hope. 92% of publishers have an Open Access policy but they vary widely. In particular, re-use rights need to be clear and explicit – they are the key to UKPMC text-mining plans for instance. Wellcome are working with Nature Publishing Group to define a model for rights and it is hoped that this will be quickly adopted by other publishers.
On the subject of complexity, Bill Hubbard’s presentation had a lovely slide (number 18) showing the bewildering variety of options facing an author trying to comply with a funder’s mandate.
The RIN report on paying open access fees was referred to by various speakers and there were requests for more case studies to be published along the lines of the Nottingham University case study in that report. Wellcome suspect that, in multi-funded papers, they are currently picking up an unfairly high proportion of costs simply because they have provided funds that are easier to tap into. Wellcome hope this will change. Astrid Wissenburg, from ESRC and RCUK, noted that Research Councils are public bodies and therefore have to follow public accounting rules. They cannot therefore be as flexible as Wellcome in providing funds for OA. Several members of the audience agreed that this is a problem badly in need of a solution.
Astrid also gave a summary of the recent RCUK report on open access. RCUK is planning to support open access by extending support for publishing in open access journals including pay-to-publish and by building on mandates to deposit research papers. One questioner noted that the report found that researchers were not well-informed about open access, and wondered why RCUK was bothering if researchers were not bothered. Astrid stated that RCUK has responsibility for ensuring adequate research infrastructure and saw a duty to push the debate on open access. She also noted that the report had found an awareness gap, not a lack of interest. Indeed, senior research staff were very supportive of open access. It was interesting that although the day was in general good-humoured there were still undercurrents of antagonism between the pro- and anti- open access parties.
There were reports from a couple of interesting research projects. One, the EU-funded PEER project is looking at the impact of self-archiving on publishing and research. So much of recent discussion of Open Access has focused on the author-pays route it will be interesting to see the results of PEER, looking at what it calls stage eprints. The project will start producing preliminary reports in autumn 2009 but will its final results are not due until 2011, with a conference due in summer 2011. The Houghton report on Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models was described by Charles Oppenheim, one of the co-authors. The economic model had 2300 costed activities and 550 basic data items, but it was not possible to find reliable costings for all these activities. There has therefore been trenchant criticism of the report from publisher groups. I rather suspect that the criticism would have been less trenchant if the report had not drawn conclusions widely seen as favouring open access.
The final part of the day focused on Higher Education. Paul Ayris set out the rationale for UCL’s open access policy (recently announced) – it is a way to achieve UCL’s objectives of “developing and disseminating original knowledge to benefit the world”. Paul Hubbard from HEFCE talked about the Research Excellence Framework. He noted that sharing is an integral feature of research and that shared findings are more likely to built on and applied. Finally Bill Hubbard talked about change and, as noted above, encouraged research funders and repository managers to work more closely to support research authors.
Another summary by Chris Keene has a clearer account of the day – I just focused on what interested me.
I took away from the day a sense that mandates are here to stay but they are not sufficient on their own. Funders, institutional managers, librarians, repository managers, publishers – all must work together to help make it as easy as possible for researchers to comply with mandates. JISC, RIN, RSP, RCUK, the EU all have roles to play in producing guidelines and research.

My first love in science was chemistry. It was the usual story of an inspiring and eccentric teacher who stoked my interest and got me hooked on transformations, equations and the periodic table. OK, so the bangs, colours and smells helped a bit. My interest lasted until sometime during my chemistry degree course, then unfortunately waned dramatically. After graduating, my interest did pick up a bit but I realised by then that chemistry and me were destined just to be good friends. My relationship with chemistry (and indeed with science) was not going to be an intimate one, with hanky-panky and rumpy-pumpy, but a skittering, lightweight interest. More of a light hydrogen bond than a deep triple-bonded affair.
I found my way therefore into libraries and started working as a librarian in a pharmaceutical R&D Information department. It seemed to me then (early 1980s) that the most interesting stuff going on was always in chemistry – substructure searches, connection tables and the like. I didn’t get to do any of that but had to content myself with looking after the printed research tools.

Chemists have always been big information users and Chemical Abstracts was the king of indexes, taking up more shelf space than anything else in my library at that time. The arrival of the quinquennial Chem Abs collected index was always a big deal – we could throw away ten sets of individual volume indexes and replace them by one giant set of indexes. Eventually though pressure on space was such that we could not accommodate the printed Chem Abs and had to make the switch to microfilm. We had a cunning machine that let you type in the number of the abstract you wanted to view and then the microfilm reader automatically wound the film to about the right place on the spool. It was high-tech for those times but now it seems gloriously retro.
I’m sure many chemists and chemical information specialists will, like me, have shed a tear when they saw this announcement from Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS):

Effective January 1, 2010, Chemical Abstracts (TM) and other print products (with the exception of the CA SELECTS (TM) products) will no longer be available in print.

Actually I am surprised it has taken this long. Cumulated Index Medicus (the print more-or-less equivalent of PubMed), for example, ceased print publication in 2004. With various online versions of Chemical Abstracts and the wonderful SciFinder interface, the printed volumes are pretty much redundant.
I nearly broke wind in surprise when I recently read another headline – CAS Launches Free Online Database. Could it be that CAS, after bitterly resisting the US NLM’s work in making PubChem available for free, had undergone a conversion to free data? Were they going to make their database of 44 million chemical substances freely available? Reading further I found my answer:

[CAS] officially launched Common Chemistry, a free online database containing information on 7,800 chemicals of widespread and general interest as well as all 118 elements from the periodic table … the substances in Common Chemistry were selected because they had been cited 1,000 or more times in CAS databases

Not quite 44 million, but I suppose 8,000 is a start.
For now though the PubChem service looks like a better bet, with over 19 million unique structures. It is really a chemical database for biologists though, lacking the physico-chemical properties that chemists may need but offering information mainly on substances with biological activity. PubChem has close links with ChemSpider, another free chemical database with about 21 million substances. ChemSpider was also the result of a recent press release as it has been acquired by the Royal Chemical Society, “to fulfil its strategic objective of disseminating knowledge to the chemical community and advancing the chemical sciences“. The press release says that “ChemSpider is the richest single source of structure-based chemistry information” and it’s good to see that it is in good hands. One can’t help reflecting on the difference between the UK’s learned society for chemists – helping to develop a free chemical database service – and the USA’s equivalent, the American Chemical Society who own CAS.
Chemistry seems to be everywhere these days. The UK Chemical Database Service (CDS) at Daresbury is again fighting for its life, in the face of a review by EPSRC. CDS have set up an online petition. CDS is a “national facility dedicated to the provision of centralised chemical information for the UK academic community“. It offers crystallographic data, spectroscopy data and synthetic organic chemistry databases. The petition asks users to affirm that they see a need for a UK national chemical database service.
I also received an email (funnily enough I just received a second copy of it) asking for my input “to help shape the future of chemistry database solutions. The global market research firm mmr is currently conducting a short survey about chemistry database solutions, and you are invited to participate.”
I didn’t at first spot the “market research firm” bit. The survey is ostensibly about SciFinder, CrossFire and Reaxys. Perhaps I’m too cynical but in reality the survey looks to me like a marketing puff for Reaxys, Elsevier’s new chemistry database, sorry I mean “workflow solution for chemists”. I thought I was shaping the future of chemistry databases, but in reality I’m just shaping the future of Elsevier’s profits. Oh well, ’twas ever thus.

Earlier this year Heather drew attention to Vivian Siegel’s editorials on supporting outreach efforts and on authorship and acknowledgement. I’m ashamed to say I did not see Heather’s post at the time but am pleased to find it now as I recently had the pleasure of meeting Vivian Siegel, and hearing her give an excellent talk entitled “How to get published (in a high profile journal)”.
Vivian is editor of a new journal, DMM: Disease Models & Mechanisms, published by the estimable Company of Biologists, and was previously chief editor at Cell and then executive director and one of the launch editors of PLoS Biology. So she does know something about high profile journals and about editing. Currently she is Director of the Center for Science Communication at Vanderbilt University. The Center aims “to help authors of basic biomedical research publish better papers in better journals, and to help potential editors gain experience and improve their skills”. One example is the Vanderbilt editors’ club, described in an article in DMM. This is a group of post-doctoral fellows and graduate students that offers editing services, free of charge, to Vanderbilt faculty and trainees.
Anyway, it seems to me that her editorials in DMM are becoming required reading. Thus far she has written on:

• Online tools for radical collaboration
• The long tail in scientific communication
• Drinking from the firehose of scientific publishing
• Public engagement
• Authorship and acknowledgement
• Peer review and publishing – this includes advice to authors on how to get published

• Her path to DMM, and what it aims to do

All of these are available for free at present.
In short, if you are interested in scientific publishing and scientific communication then get along to DMM and have a read.
Oh, and if you want to know how to get published etc, these were her five bullet points:

• Do important work
• Write well (be sure to use presubmission enquiries and a covering letter)
• Write strategically, for the reviewers
• Make the editor your advocate

• Understand the decision

Paying for open access has been on my mind recently. All those “open choice”, “author choice”, “open option”, “open article”, “online open”, “open science” and other similar schemes (why does each publisher have to have a different name for the same thing?!?), they create a need for someone to pay a fee in order to get their article published. Richard has already commented on this , highlighting the RIN’s recent report on the topic.
My preoccupation has been occasioned partly by discussions with our procurement people yesterday about how we purchase journals (in preparation for the RCUK Shared Services Centre). The possible impact of open access on journal subscriptions occasioned a lengthy detour to explain what OA was and what the strategic implications were for procurement. That moved us into high-level RCUK strategy on research outputs, which is the terrain of the RCUK Research Outputs Group, who recently issued their own report .
When I returned to my office I found a flyer from the Portland Press with news of its new open access journal ASN Neuro . I was perplexed briefly as it mentioned an “Institutional Membership rate of $630”. Sounds like a subscription, but it’s not – the journal is Open Access so it can’t be. No, this membership gives you a $210 discount off the publication charge for any papers that your institution’s authors may publish.
Other publishers have similar things – OUP’s Nucleic Acids Research has morphed its online subscription into an institutional membership that confers discounts on publication charges. Some, such as PNAS give a discount on publication fees to any institution with an institutional site licence.
The Portland Press flyer also mentioned their new Opt2Pay (cute name) scheme, also with a tie-in to subscriptions.
And of course BioMedCentral have had an Institutional membership scheme for some time. In its early years this did not look very attractive as we were publishing little with BMC journals, and the membership charge was relatively high. I think they have modified the scheme, with more options, now and I really must look at it again. PLoS also had an institutional membership scheme, but it required quite a strong commitment. I really need to check it out again.
I can see that the link between subscriptions and OA fees is going to give me a few headaches when I try to figure out what journals we can afford for next year.

Bora wrote recently about various aspects of power and how “online” has changed the balance of power in different ways. I want to talk about how the advent of e-journals has changed the power of publishers and other players in the journal market.
There has for some time been a trend towards fewer personal subscriptions to scientific journals. Writing in 2001 Carol Tenopir said the average number of personal subscriptions per scientist has roughly halved over 20 years, This has probably been accelerated by electronic journals. If your institution provides desktop electronic access to your favourite journals then you have less incentive to retain a personal subscription. Even the weeklies like Nature and _Science and popular titles like Cell were affected by this trend. Each of those publishers thought long and hard about how to introduce a site licence scheme that provided stable levels of total subscription income. When they first introduced their new business models I think it came as a shock to most libraries; we had to pay a premium rate to make up for all those lost personal subscriptions. Publishers realised then that they needed to improve relations with librarians, who were now becoming their principal customers. They developed new websites and information packs aimed at us, enlarged their sales teams and many also established library advisory committees to gather feedback.
I’ve had the honour of attending some NPG Library Committee meetings, and found them very interesting – a chance to learn both about NPG and about other librarians’ experiences. Of course we can’t expect publishers simply to listen to our views and immediately act on them, but they do take note of what we say and they also explain their thinking to us, to help us appreciate their side. I didn’t attend this year’s meeting, which took place a couple of weeks ago, but I understand that the economic situation figured in the discussions.
A propos of that, librarian Cristina Pikas has drawn attention on her blog to a statement from ICOLC about the economic crisis. ICOLC is the International Coalition of Library Consortia – a kind of meta-consortium. Their statement seeks to persuade publishers to be gentle with us when it comes to setting prices for 2010. Cristina highlighted one statement we can do without costly new interfaces and features. Now is not the time for new products. That does make sense to me, though work on improving standards compliance is an important exception.
So, ejournals have enhanced the relationship between libraries and publishers, and perhaps lessened the relationship with direct subscribers. Ejournals have also shaken up the journal supply chain. Traditionally libraries have used a serials agent, like a specialised bookseller, to buy journals. That means we just deal with the agent and they handle the payments to all the different publishers. But as ejournal deals have become ever more complex, so we have had to increase our direct negotiations with publishers. I think most librarians still value the role of agents, but publishers push us more and more to deal direct. One large publisher recently informed me that my request, to switch from print+electronic to electronic-only subscriptions, must be given to them directly as they did not accept such instructions from agents. It didn’t help on that occasion that the publisher and agent used quite different terminology for what I had thought was a simple instruction. Anyway, I had to go and lie down for a bit to lower my blood pressure after that particular exchange!
All this increased dialogue between librarians and publishers makes life interesting. I have no doubt that online will keep on changing the balance of power between different players in scholarly communication.

I heaved a sigh of relief today. My last journal subscription wrinkle of 2009 has finally been ironed out. It’s a pretty big wrinkle (the big deal of one of the big four publishers) and needed a mighty iron to smooth it down but now, only four months late, we have access to that big deal. I won’t mention the publisher, but I expect any academic librarian will guess who I am talking about.
They are the new behemoth on the block – the product of a merger a couple of years ago. This is the first year that they have fully merged their operations, and it has been a very painful process. The first step was merging the two electronic platforms, meaning the URLs for half the journals needed to change. But that was simple compared to merging the two commercial operations. Two different sets of customer records, two different ways of calculating prices for their big deal, two different sets of staff. All these had to be battered into submission carefully molded into a single operation. I feel for the staff of the publisher, who have had an enormous job to sort out all of the complications.
In the past we used to sort out journal renewals in September and October, and perhaps up to November for any tricky issues, plus odd problems that might come to light in January. These days we often are still at it until February.
Sorting out the details of a big deal is always time-consuming and fiddly. In this case it didn’t help that I went away on holiday just days after I received the initial offer from this publisher. But then it didn’t help that the offer, for calendar year 2009, only arrived a week before Christmas 2008. It was never going to be settled in time for 1ate Jan 2009. One highly confusing spreadsheet and a few phone calls later, I began to understand how the deal might work and I started the tricky job of explaining to the other libraries in my group how it might work for them. Four more spreadsheets later and I-don’t-know-how-many more emails and phone calls, and I was ready for the last step – explaining it all over again to the person who has to sign the contract. That happened last week and this morning the access is fully operational.
I am comforted that fellow librarians across the country, and indeed across the world, have all been experiencing similar frustrations with this deal – it’s good to know that you don’t suffer alone.
In the light of this, the April Fool’s day joke about publishing mergers was quite scary. Imagine a merger on this scale – we would probably still be sorting out the details in September!

I wrote previously about copyright, and the way that entertainment is influencing science. If you are interested in that topic, then look up a review in this week’s Science of Laurence Lessig’s book Remix:

an engaging read about how the Internet affects our cultural production system and the policy implications of these effects.

Copyright law has not kept up with technical change and the consequent cultural change:

our current approach to copyright developed at a time when quotation from recorded music and audiovisual works was only available to commercial entities, and thus it was designed to regulate such entities… [but it is now]… governing the day-to-day cultural practices of millions of amateurs who are the foundation of Internet culture

The review draws attention to why this is all relevant to science:

concerns he raises about excessive property rights getting in the way of creative uses of existing materials apply as well to data and the technical and legal constraints on sharing them, to research tools and patents constraining their application, to materials and material transfer agreements that can impede their employment across institutions and labs, and to open access publishing.

and also points out that:

Lessig weaves his tapestry from many stories about human cooperation…Two or three of these touch on efforts to harness decentralized contributors to scientific projects

Rereading this post, I note that it consists mostly of quotes from that book review, which bears out the importance of quotation, borrowing and remixing.

I thought I was going mad this morning as I browsed the online contents page of today’s Nature issue. When I got to the sections for Articles and Letters, the entries looked longer than usual, due to the inclusion of a two or sentence summary for each item.
I checked earlier issues and could not see these summaries, so it looks like a new development, though I haven’t seen any announcement about it.
I think it is a good idea – making browsing more informed – but some readers may dislike it as it is of course less compact than before.
It is surprising that many online tables of contents look so much like their print counterparts. Elsevier have a cunning thing that lets you preview the abstract on the contents page, but that’s all that springs to mind without going and checking other publishers.
So, what do you think of the new contents page?
I am also curious to know what drove NPG to make the change?

I am a fan of JISC – the Joint Information Systems Committee – I reported on their annual conference recently. I would have liked to go to the debate they organised last week on Libraries of the Future (LOTF) but was unable to make it. JISC are tremendously influential in the sphere of academic and research libraries. Increasingly I am also in love with the Research Information Network (RIN). Both of these bodies address problems relevant to my working environment. Let me explain.
Librarians are essentially practical people; practitioners. Our job is to provide a service to our customers and we try to do that job effectively, with a smile thrown in for good measure. Most of us have not developed abstract theories to describe what we do and why it works or doesn’t work. Putting the journals over here; arranging the books like that; providing this or that service – all these things just work for our libraries and users and so we continue to do them that way. (There have of course always been librarians of a more theoretical bent, but these people tend to move out of direct service provision and into research within library schools. Dare I say that this research can be a little bit abstruse).
So, we practitioners have followed our instincts – what you might call Gut Feeling Based Librarianship. Things are changing though. Nowadays we have more choices to make than ever before: the information market has become more complex; users’ needs have diversified; and the desire to be not just effective but also cost effective has become an imperative. Thus, Evidence-Based Library & Information Practice (EBLIP) has appeared on the scene. My impression is that it grew out of health librarianship, as health librarians became involved in the Evidence Based Medicine movement. They helped systematic reviewers to gather evidence for their analyses, and also started giving training to medical students in critical appraisal of medical evidence. Some of these librarians then decided to take a leaf out of the EBM book and hailed EBLIP as the way forward for libarianship. All our decisions should be based on good evidence.
I must confess to some ambivalence as to the value of EBLIP. I can’t help the feeling that much of what we do as librarians is situation specific, and that therefore a detailed knowledge of our own institutional environment and user needs is more important to serving those users than is a body of research evidence gathered in other institutions. The results of a survey or study hold true for the population surveyed or the particular situation studied, but not necessarily for all populations or situations. For example a study of user reactions to ebooks in public libraries, or amongst undergraduates, may not mirror the reactions of research scientists to ebook services. This kind of evidence is more like a suggestion for something that might be worth trying, rather than concrete evidence.
Perhaps I have touched on my real problem with EBLIP there. I work in a research institute library but I see few pieces of library research from that environment. The major library sectors like public libraries, academic libraries, and health-care libraries are the subjects of much research, but the research institute library sector is very small in comparison and generates little research of itself. I think some contrarian part of me must enjoy working in a sector that is not mainstream (else why would I have stayed in it for 20 years?) but being different does create problems. In the early days of online resources it was difficult to persuade publishers to craft deals to suit us, as we were a small and complicated sector. The same holds true today for evidence generation.
Which brings me back to JISC and RIN. Supposing, just supposing, that I suspend my disbelief and arrogance (for I confess there may be a bit of that in my attitude to EBLIP) and start casting around for sources of evidence relevant to scientific researchers and their use of information. I may look at some old Royal Society reports on scientific information, but the most recent was published in 1998. Probably my first place to look will be the JISC website and their many programmes . They have the resources to carry out large-scale research such as the e-books observatory that gathered 40,000 responses from a large number of institutions. The downside is that it focused on undergraduate textbooks rather than research monographs. JISC has a strong Higher Education bias but it does look at issues important for researchers too. Their programmes cover e-research, e-resources, the information environment and other areas. I had hoped JISC activity related to researchers outside Higher Education might increase after the Research Councils signed a partnership agreement with JISC two years ago. Sadly RCUK chose not to partner in the JISC research programme, ironically.
My next port of call for evidence will be the Research Information Network (RIN). JISC were recently called a national treasure and I think that RIN are fast becoming another treasure. Many of their recent reports have been required reading for librarian interested in serving researchers. Obviously this is because RIN focuses on research but it is also a testament to their ability to pick out topical and significant issues to explore. RIN¹ have managed to keep a pragmatic edge to their work. Their most recent report is on e-journals – their use and impact. This “looks into how researchers use e-journals and the impact this has on provision of library and information services. The findings reveal some staggering figures for the amount of e-journals being used by researchers”. I can’t say that surprises me, though I’m not sure I want this information highlighted if there are any publishers reading.
As I write this I realise that I should also mention another institution UKOLN . UKOLN aims to inform and influence policy in LIS, and work closely with bodies like JISC.
So there is some relevant research out there, but I still say there is not enough that fits my situation in a research institute. “Wait a moment”, I hear you say, “the answer is obvious – why don’t you undertake some research yourself?”. The thought has occurred to me too, but I refer you to my earlier comment – I’m a practitioner. What do I know about undertaking research? Back in the early 1990s in what Bruce Royan has called JISC’s last “Great Leap Forward” I did some mildly innovative things (I started OMNI and took part in the SuperJournal project ). But I am not equipped with the skills to start a research project. I have ideas, but have failed to turn them into active projects. I think this will have to change. I can no longer be “just” a practitioner. I have to teach myself to become an evidence-generator too.

¹ A nice summary of the work of RIN has just been published in The Biochemist magazine.

I’ve written before on the phenomenon of new journals. I’m particularly fascinated by the way that families of titles develop. In recent months we have seen Science Signaling out of the AAAS stable, EMBO Molecular Medicine from EMBO, and Nature Chemistry from Nature Publishing Group (NPG). The latter title is just the latest in a long stream from NPG. In the last 15 years the growth of the Nature brand has been remarkable. I remember the first issue of the curiously titled Bio/technology in 1983, and the relief when the title changed in 1996 to Nature Biotechnology with no punctuation marks. (I wonder if there have been any other journals with unusual punctuation in their titles?). By then Nature Genetics and Nature Medicine had appeared, so the family was well-established. But new Nature babies kept appearing, making us Librarians pray for the publishing equivalent of birth control. Just as we thought all subject areas had been covered then in 2000 NPG started the Nature Reviews series with another seven titles, followed a few years later by the Nature Clinical Protocols series, now in the process of being rebranded as Nature Reviews. One of my colleagues recalls how happy she was when in 2002 NPG launched a new non-biomedical title (_Nature Materials_)- at last an NPG title that she didn’t have to subscribe to!
The most remarkable thing about this family of Nature-branded journals – now 32 strong by my count – is that the publisher has maintained excellence across all these titles. The original brand is not diluted but rather enhanced by the extensions. Someone in Crinnan Towers clearly knows their business (and that’s Business with a capital $).
The latest news from NPG to reach my ears is that they planning another launch, this time not in a specialised field but bang in the centre of science. It’s to be called Nature Science, with a mission “to place before the general public the grand results of advancing science, serving society”. They will also make their first foray into social sciences with the launch of Nature Economics, “to take part in a severe contest between intelligence and ignorance, giving early information of all advances made in any branch of Natural knowledge”. These two will be closely followed by Nature Royal, probably a joint venture between NPG and the Royal Society but possibly a step downmarket in a NPG and Hello! link-up. A bit later down the road we may see a move into the market for mother and baby magazines with NeoNature Nurture.
From further afield I hear of counter launches from AAAS – bringing out Science Nature – and from Pearson – bringing out The Economical Naturist.
NPG are also continuing their strategy of innovations in emerging communications technology, with the launch of Nature Twitter, specially designed to be compatible with the new Nature Phone – the N-Phone. Meanwhile, a group of radical OA activists have announced their plans to send out each weekly issue of Nature as a series of tweets, one sentence at a time. They call this Twitter Nature, or Twitcher for short.
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And then I woke up, and took another paracetamol.