Tag Archives: Nature Publishing Group

January 31, 2016 deadlines for early bird tickets (ESOF) and conference abstracts (emerging technologies)

ESOF 2016 (EuroScience Open Forum)

Early bird tickets for this biennial science conference are available until Jan.  31, 2016 according to a Jan. 18, 2016 email notice,

Our most affordable tickets are available to purchase until the end of the month, so make sure you get yours before they disappear. Prices start from only £75 for a full four-day pass for early careers researchers (up to 5 years post doc), and £225 for a full delegate pass. All registrations are entitled to a year long complimentary subscription to Nature at this time.

You can also book your accommodation when you register to attend ESOF. We have worked hard with our city partners to bring you the best deals for your stay in Manchester. With the summer set to be busy with not only ESOF but major international sporting events, make sure you take advantage of these deals.

To register to attend please click here

You can find out more about the event which takes place from July 23 – 27, 2016 in Manchester, England here and/or you can watch this video,

For any interested journalists, media registration has opened (from the Jan. 18, 2016 notice),

Media registration opens

We are delighted to announce our ESOF press accreditation is available for journalists and science communications professionals to register for the conference. Accreditation provides complimentary access to the full ESOF programme, social events and a range of exclusive press only activities. Further details of the eligibility criteria and registration process can be found here.

Nature Publishing Group offers journalists a travel grant which will cover most if not all the expenses associated with attending 2016 ESOF (from the ESOF Nature Travel Grant webpage),

The Nature Travel Grant Scheme offers journalists and members of media organisations from around the world the opportunity to attend ESOF for free. The grant offers complimentary registration as well as help covering travel and accommodation costs.

1. Purpose

Created by EuroScience, the biennial ESOF – EuroScience Open Forum – meeting is the largest pan-European general science conference dedicated to scientific research and innovation. At ESOF meetings leading scientists, researchers, journalists, business people, policy makers and the general public from all over the world discuss new discoveries and debate the direction that research is taking in the sciences, humanities and social sciences.

Springer Nature is a leading global research, educational and professional publisher, home to an array of respected and trusted brands providing quality content through a range of innovative products and services, including the journal Nature. Springer Nature was formed in 2015 through the merger of Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, Macmillan Education and Springer Science+Business Media. Nature Publishing Group has supported ESOF since its very first meeting in 2004.

Similar to the 2012 and 2014 edition of meeting, Springer Nature is funding the Nature Travel Grant Scheme for journalists to attend ESOF2016 with the aim to increase the impact of ESOF.

2. The Scheme

In addition to free registration, the Nature Travel Grant Scheme offers a lump sum of £450 for UK based journalists, £600 for journalists based in Europe and £800 for journalists based outside of Europe, to help cover the costs of travel and accommodation to attend ESOF2016.

3. Who can apply?

All journalists irrespective of their gender, age, nationality, place of residence and media type (paper, radio, TV, web) are welcome to apply. Media accreditation will be required.

4. Application procedure

To submit an application sign into the EuroScience Conference and Membership Platform (ESCMP) and click on “Apply for a Grant”. Follow the application procedure.

On submitting the application form for travel grants, you agree to the full acceptance of the rules and to the decision taken by the Selection Committee.

The deadline for submitting an application is February 29th 2016, 12:00 pm CET.

Good luck!

4th Annual Governance of Emerging Technologies: Law, Policy and Ethics Conference

Here’s more about the conference (deadline for abstracts is Jan. 31, 2016) from the conference’s Call for Abstract’s webpage,

Fourth Annual Conference on
Governance of Emerging Technologies: Law, Policy, and Ethics

May 24-26, 2016, Tempe, Arizona

Call for abstracts:

The co-sponsors invite submission of abstracts for proposed presentations.  Submitters of abstracts need not provide a written paper, although provision will be made for posting and possible post-conference publication of papers for those presenters interested in such options.  Although abstracts are invited for any aspect or topic relating to the governance of emerging technologies, some particular themes that will be emphasized at this year’s conference include existential or catastrophic risks, governance implications of algorithms, resilience and emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, military technologies, and gene editing.

Abstracts should not exceed 500 words.
Abstracts must be submitted by January 31, 2016 to be considered.
Decisions on abstracts will be made by the program committee and communicated by February 29 [2016]. 

Funding: The sponsors will pay for the conference registration (including all conference meals) for one presenter for each accepted abstract.  In addition, we will have limited funds available for travel subsidies in whole or in part.  After completing your abstract online, you will be asked if you wish to apply for a travel subsidy.  Any such additional funding will be awarded based on the strength of the abstract, demonstration of financial need, and/or the potential to encourage student authors and early-career scholars.  Accepted presenters for whom conference funding is not available will need to pay their own transportation and hotel costs.

For more information, please contact Lauren Burkhart at Lauren.Burkhart@asu.edu.

You don’t often see conference organizers offering to pay registration and meals for a single presenter from each accepted submission. Good luck!

Is it Nature or is it Henry Gee? science’s woman wars continue (or start up again)

I was thinking we’d get a few more months before another ‘how women are treated in science circles’ or gender issues (as it is sometimes known) story erupted. Our last cycle was featured in my Oct. 18, 2013 posting and mentioned again in my Dec. 31, 2013 posting titled: 2013: women, science, gender, and sex. (Note: I will be referring to these postinsg and the Oct. scandals again in this posting but first, I have to lay the groundwork.)

It seems Henry Gee, a senior editor at Nature magazine, disagreed with my preference for waiting a few more months and decided to start a new cycle on Jan. 17, 2014 when he outed (revealed her personal name) pseudonymous blogger and online presence, Dr. Isis, on his Twitter feed. Here’s the nature (pun noted) of the offence (from Michael Eisen’s Jan. 20, 2014 posting on his ‘it is NOT junk’ blog),

DrIsisHenryGeeIn addition to  Dr. Isis’ personal name, Gee describes her as an “inconsequential sports physio” which seems to have disturbed some folks at least as much as the outing. Dr. Isis describes herself this way (from the Isis the Scientist blog About page,

Dr. Isis is an exercise physiologist at a major research university working on some terribly impressive stuff. …

In the Jan. 20, 2014 posting on her blog, Dr. Isis responds to Gee’s action on Twitter (partial excerpt from the posting; Note: Links have been removed),

So, while I am “ok”, were his actions “ok?” Of course not, and they give me pause. I have undoubtedly been vocal over the last four years of the fact that I believe Nature, the flagship of our profession, does not have a strong track record of treating women fairly. I believe that Henry Gee, a representative of the journal, is responsible for some of that culture.  That’s not “vitriolic” and it’s not “bullying”. That is me saying, as a woman, that there is something wrong with how this journal and its editors engage 50% of the population (or 20% of scientists) and I believe in my right to say “this is not ‘ok’.”  Henry Gee responded by skywriting my real name because he believed that would hurt me personally – my career, my safety, my family. Whatever. Regardless of the actual outcome, the direct personal nature of the attack is highlighted by its support from some that I “had it coming.. [emphasis mine]

Henry Gee’s actions were meant to intimidate me into silence. He took this approach likely with the thought that it was the most powerful way he could hurt me. Nothing more. Although I am ok, there are some recent victims of outing behavior that are not. That’s frightening. To think that the editor of a journal would respond to criticism of his professional conduct regarding the fair treatment of women by attempting to personally injure and damage..

I recommend reading the post in it’s entirety as she also addresses the adjective, ‘inconsequential’ and expands further on the issues she has with Nature (magazine). As for the emphasis I”ve added to the phrase “… I have it coming …”, it reminded me of this passage in my Dec. 31, 2013 posting,

think we (men and women) are obliged to take good look at sexism around us and within us and if you still have any doubts about the prevalence of sexism and gender bias against women, take a look at Sydney Brownstone’s Oct. 22, 2013 article for Fast Company,

These ads for U.N. Women show what happens if you type things like “women need to” into Google. The autocomplete function will suggest ways to fill in the blank based on common search terms such as “know their place” and “shut up.”

A quick, unscientific study of men-based searches comes up with very different Autocomplete suggestions. Type in “men need to,” and you’ll get “feel needed,” “grow up,” or “ejaculate.” Type in “men shouldn’t,” and you might get, “wear flip flops.”

Those searches were made in March 2013.

Gee managed to fuse two prevailing attitudes toward women in a single tweet, rage when women aren’t ‘nice’ or ‘don’t know their place’ (apparently, Dr. Isis can be quite stinging in her criticisms and so he outs her) and dismissiveness (she’s an “inconsequential sports physio”) while showcasing Nature’s (his employer) and by extension his own importance in the world of science (“Nature quakes in its boots”).

Michael Eisen in his Jan. 20, 2014 posting explains why he thinks this situation is important and unpacks some of the reasons why a young scientist might wish to operate with a pseudonym (Note: A link has been removed),

Gee and Dr. Isis have apparently had issues in the past. I don’t know the full history, but I was witness to some of it after Gee published a misogynistic short story in Nature several years back. Gee behaved like an asshole back then, and apparently he has not stopped.

Think about what happened here. A senior figure at arguably the most important journal in science took it upon himself to reveal the name of a young, female, Latina scientist with whom he has fought and whom he clearly does not like. …

Having myself come under fairly withering criticism from Dr. Isis, I feel somewhat qualified to speak to this. She has a sharp tongue. She speaks with righteous indignation. I don’t always think she’s being fair. And, to be honest, her words hurt. But you know what? She was also right. I have learned a lot from my interactions with Dr. Isis – albeit sometimes painfully. I reflected on what she had to say – and why she was saying it. I am a better person for it. I have to admit that her confrontational style is effective.

If our conflicts had existed in the “real world” where I’m a reasonably well known, male tenured UC [University of California] Berkeley professor and HHMI  [Howard Hughes Medical Institute] Investigator and she’s a young, female, Latina woman at the beginning of her research career, the deck is stacked against her. Whatever the forum, odds are I’m going to come out ahead, not because I’m right, but because that’s just the way this world works. And I think we can all agree that this is a very bad thing. This kind of power imbalance is toxic and distorting. It infuses every interaction. The worst part of it is obvious – it serves to keep people who start down, down. But it also gives people on the other side the false sense that they are right. It prevents them from learning and growing.

But when my interlocutor is anonymous, the balance of power shifts. Not completely. But it does shift. And it was enough, I think, to fundamentally change the way the conversations ended. And that was a good thing. I know I’m not going to convince many people that they should embrace this feeling of discomfort – this loss of power. But I hope, at least, people can appreciate why some amongst us feel so strongly about protecting this tool in their arsenal, and why what Gee did is more fundamental and reprehensible than the settling of a grudge.

I recommend reading Eisen’s posting in its entirety and this Jan. 21, 2014 posting by Dr. Julienne Rutherford on her Biological ANthropology Developing Investigators Troop blog. She provides more context for this situation and a personal perspective as an untenured professor herself (Note: Links have been removed),

As a biological anthropologist working toward tenure, a paper in Nature could “make” my career. I have as-yet-untenured colleagues at Ivies who get tsked-tsked for NOT submitting to Nature. The reverence for impact factors requires us to consider this the pinnacle of scientific publishing, at the same time that senior representatives of that very same journal with public platforms show absolutely no shame in trivializing our efforts as scientists or our very real struggles as outsiders in the Old White Boys Club. Struggles that make me feel like this a lot, and I actually have it pretty easy.

This continued outsider existence is what leads many to seek the clearly imperfect protection of an online pseudonym. Pseudonymity on the the internet has a long and defensible history, largely as protection of some kind, often against reprisals by employers. Sometimes as protection against cyber-stalking and sometimes real-life stalking and physical assault. But another reason is that it can offer protection against the clubbishness and bullying of privileged scholars with powers to hire, publish, grant funds. The power to deem one as a scientist of consequence. The power to refuse the pervasive poison that is their privilege and blindness. …

Interestingly, the same day Gee lashed out at Dr. Isis, Nature issued an apology for a letter they had recently published. Here’s an excerpt from the letter that was published online on Jan. 15, 2014,

Research: Publish on the basis of quality, not gender by Lukas Koube. Nature 505, 291 (16 January 2014) doi:10.1038/505291e Published online 15 January 2014

The publication of research papers should be based on quality and merit, so the gender balance of authors is not relevant in the same way as it might be for commissioned writers (see Nature 504, 188; 2013) [a special issue on women and gender issues in science]. Neither is the disproportionate number of male reviewers evidence of gender bias. …

Koube’s letter is behind a paywall but i gather the rest of it continues in a similarly incendiary and uninformed fashion.

Kelly Hills writes about the letter and Nature’s apology in a Jan. 17, 2014 posting on her Life As An Extreme Sport blog (Note: Links have been removed),

While Nature’s apology is better than a nonpology, it’s not actually a full apology, and it doesn’t surprise me that it’s not being as well-received as the editors likely hoped. I detailed some of my issues with the apology on Twitter this morning, but I wanted to take the time to actually expand on what is necessary for a complete apology.

You can find quite a few different opinions on what constitutes an actual apology. I am fond of a four stage approach: Recognition, Responsibility, Remorse/Regret, Remedy. I think it’d be easiest to go through each of these and the Nature apology, to see where they succeed, and where they fail. Hopefully this will be illustrative not only to them now, but others in the future.

… When you recognize your mistake, you need to be specific. This is what Nature said:

On re-examining the letter and the process, we consider that it adds no value to the discussion and unnecessarily inflames it, that it did not receive adequate editorial attention, and that we should not have published it.

This isn’t a bad start. Ultimately, there is recognition that the commentary was inflammatory and it shouldn’t have been published. That said, what would have made it a good example of recognition is acknowledgement that the commentary that was published was offensive, as well. It’s not about adding no value, or even being inflammatory–it’s that it’s a point of view that has been systematically deconstructed and debunked over years, to the point that people who hold it are actually advocating biased, if not complete misogynistic, positions.

I found this a very interesting read as Hills elucidates on one of my pet peeves, the non apology apology and something I recognize as one of my own faults, offering a non apology, i.e., offering excuses for my behaviour along with “I’m sorry.”

Before finishing this post, I want to include a little more information about Henry Gee (from his Wikipedia essay; Note: Links have been removed),

Dr Henry Gee (born 1962 in London, England) is a British paleontologist and evolutionary biologist. He is a senior editor of Nature, the scientific journal.[1]

Gee earnt his B.Sc. at the University of Leeds and completed his Ph.D. at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where, in his spare time, he played keyboard for a jazz band fronted by Sonita Alleyne, who went on to establish the TV and radio production company Somethin’ Else.[2] Gee joined Nature as a reporter in 1987 and is now Senior Editor, Biological Sciences.[citation needed] He has published a number of books, including Before the Backbone: Views on the Origin of the Vertebrates (1996), In Search of Deep Time (1999),[3][4] A Field Guide to Dinosaurs (illustrated by Luis Rey) (2003) and Jacob’s Ladder (2004).

On January 17th, 2014, Gee became embroiled in internet controversy by revealing the identity of an anonymous science blogger, Melissa Bates [7]. Bates was an open critic of the scientific journal Nature, where Gee is a senior editor. Gee’s comments were an apparent attempt to discredit the blogger’s reputation, but many felt his doxing went too far[8] . It was later revealed that Gee is not unfamiliar with pseudonyms himself, using the pseudonym “Cromercrox” to curate his own Wikipedia entry.

I am a bit surprised by the lack of coverage on the Guardian science blogs where a number of essays were featured during the Oct. 2013 ‘sex scandals’. Perhaps no one has had enough time to write it up or perhaps the Guardian editors feel that enough has been written about gender and science. Note, Henry Gee writes for the Guardian.

It’s hard for me to tell whether or not Henry Gee’s Twitter feed (@HenryGeeBooks) is a personal account or a business account  (access seems to be restricted as of Jan. 22, 2014 12:40 pm PDT; you can access this) but it does seem that Gee has conflated his professional and personal lives in such a way that one may not be easily distinguishable from the other. This does leave me with a question, is Nature responsible for comments made on their employee’s personal Twitter feed (assuming HenryGeeBooks is a personal feed)?  No and yes.

As far as I’m concerned no employer has a right to control any aspects of an employee’s personal life unless it impacts their work, e.g. pedophiles should not be employed to work with young children. In Henry Gee’s case he invoked his employer and his professional authority as one of their editors with “Nature quakes in its boots” and that means I expect to see some sort of response from NPG .

I’ve mentioned the October 2013 scandals because Nature Publishing Group (NGP) owns Scientific American, one of the publications that was at the centre of the scandals. Their (Scientific American/NPG) response was found to be lacking that time too. At this point, we have two responses that are lacking (the excuses over the Scientific American aspects of the October 2013 scandals and the apology over the Koube letter published in January 2014) and a nonresponse with regard to Gee’s tweet.

Regarding Henry Gee, perhaps this massive indignation which has caused his Twitter page to be made inaccessible, at this time  will also cause him to reconsider his attitudes about women and about the power he wields (or wielded?). I fear that won’t be the case and that he’s more likely to be building resentment. Ultimately, this is what confounds me about these situations, how does one confront a bully without driving them into more extreme forms of the behaviour and attitudes that led to the confrontation? I don’t believe there’s ‘a one size fits all’ answer to this, I just wish there was more discussion about the issue. I speak here as a Canadian who is still haunted by L’École Polytechnique massacre in Montréal (from the Wikipedia essay; Note: Links have been removed),

The École Polytechnique Massacre, also known as the Montreal Massacre, occurred on December 6, 1989 at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Twenty-five-year-old Marc Lépine, armed with a legally obtained Mini-14 rifle and a hunting knife, shot twenty-eight people before killing himself. He began his attack by entering a classroom at the university, where he separated the male and female students. After claiming that he was “fighting feminism” and calling the women “a bunch of feminists,” he shot all nine women in the room, killing six. He then moved through corridors, the cafeteria, and another classroom, specifically targeting women to shoot. Overall, he killed fourteen women and injured ten other women and four men in just under twenty minutes before turning the gun on himself.[1][2]

I applaud the women who have spoken up and continue to speak up and I hope we all men and women can work towards ways of confronting bullies while also allowing for the possibility of change.

Finally, thanks to Susan Baxter for alerting me to this latest gender and science story cycle. Here’s Susan’s blog where she writes about medical matters (mostly). Her latest post concern’s Lyme’s disease.

A new science magazine edited and peer-reviewed by children: Frontiers for Young Minds

November 15, 2013 article by Alice Truong about Frontiers for Young Minds (for Fast Company), profiles a new journal meant to be read by children and edited and peer-reviewed by children. Let’s start with an excerpt from the Truong article as an introduction to the Frontiers for Young Minds journal (Note: Links have been removed),

Frontiers for Young Minds is made up of editors ages 8 to 18 who learn the ropes of peer review from working scientists. With 18 young minds and 38 adult authors and associate editors lending their expertise, the journal–an offshoot of the academic research network Frontiers …

With a mission to engage a budding generation of scientists, UC [University of California at] Berkeley professor Robert Knight created the kid-friendly version of Frontiers and serves as its editor-in-chief. The young editors review and approve submissions, which are written so kids can understand them–“clearly, concisely and with enthusiasm!” the guidelines suggest. Many of the scientists who provide guidance are academics, hailing from Harvard to Rio de Janeiro’s D’Or Institute for Research and Education. The pieces are peer reviewed by one of the young editors, but to protect their identities only their first names are published along with the authors’ names.

Great idea and bravo to all involved in the project! Here’s an excerpt from the Frontiers for Young Minds About webpage,

Areas in Development now include:

  • The Brain and Friends (social neuroscience)
  • The Brain and Fun (emotion)
  • The Brain and Magic (perception, sensation)
  • The Brain and Allowances (neuroeconomics)
  • The Brain and School (attention, decision making)
  • The Brain and Sports (motor control, action)
  • The Brain and Life (memory)
  • The Brain and Talking/Texting (language)
  • The Brain and Growing (neurodevelopment)
  • The Brain and Math (neural organization of math, computational neuroscience)
  • The Brain and Health (neurology, psychiatry)
  • The Brain and Robots (brain machine interface)
  • The Brain and Music (music!)
  • The Brain and Light (optogenetics)
  • The Brain and Gaming (Fun, Action, Learning)
  • The Brain and Reading
  • The Brain and Pain
  • The Brain and Tools (basis of brain measurements)
  • The Brain and History (the story of brain research)
  • The Brain and Drugs (drugs)
  • The Brain and Sleep

I believe the unofficial title for this online journal is Frontiers (in Neuroscience) for Young Minds. I guess they were trying to make the title less cumbersome which, unfortunately, results in a bit of confusion.

At any rate, there’s a quite a range of young minds at work as editors and reviewers, from the Editorial Team’s webpage,

Sacha
14 years old
Amsterdam, Netherlands

When I was just a few weeks old, we moved to Bennekom, a small town close to Arnhem (“a bridge too far”). I am now 14 and follow the bilingual stream in secondary school, receiving lessons in English and Dutch. I hope to do the International Bacquelaurate before I leave school. In my spare time, I like to play football and hang out with my mates. Doing this editing interested me for three reasons: I really wanted to understand more about my dad’s work; I like the idea of this journal that helps us understand what our parents do; and I also like the idea of being an editor!

Abby
11 years old
Israel

I currently live in Israel, but I lived in NYC and I loved it. I like wall climbing, dancing, watching TV, scuba diving, and I love learning new things about how our world works. Oh, I also love the Weird-but-True books. You should try reading them too.

Caleb
14 years old
Canada

I enjoy reading and thinking about life. I have a flair for the dramatic. Woe betide the contributor who falls under my editorial pen. I am in several theatrical productions and I like to go camping in the Canadian wilds. My comment on brains: I wish I had one.

Darius
10 years old
Lafayette, CA, USA

I am in fifth grade. In my free time I enjoy reading and computer programming. As a hobby, I make useful objects and experiment with devices. I am very interested in the environment and was one of the founders of my school’s green committee. I enjoy reading about science, particularly chemistry, biology, and neuroscience.

Marin
8 years old
Cambridge, MA, USA

3rd grader who plays the piano and loves to sing and dance. She participates in Science Club for Girls and she and her Mom will be performing in their second opera this year.

Eleanor
8 years old
Champaign, IL, USA

I like reading and drawing. My favorite colors are blue, silver, pink, and purple. My favorite food is creamed spinach. I like to go shopping with my Mom.

….

At age 8, I would have been less Marin and more Eleanor. I hated opera; my father made us listen every Sunday afternoon during the winters.

Here’s something from an article about brain-machine interfaces for the final excerpt from the website (from the articles webpage),

[downloaded from http://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/brain-machine_interfaces/7/]

[downloaded from http://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/brain-machine_interfaces/7/]

Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMI), or brain-computer interfaces (BCI), is an exciting multidisciplinary field that has grown tremendously during the last decade. In a nutshell, BMI is about transforming thought into action and sensation into perception. In a BMI system, neural signals recorded from the brain are fed into a decoding algorithm that translates these signals into motor output. This includes controlling a computer cursor, steering a wheelchair, or driving a robotic arm. A closed control loop is typically established by providing the subject with visual feedback of the prosthetic device. BMIs have tremendous potential to greatly improve the quality of life of millions of people suffering from spinal cord injury, stroke, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and other severely disabling conditions.6

I think this piece written by Jose M. Carmena and José del R. Millán and reviewed by Bhargavi, 13 years old, is a good beginner’s piece for any adults who might be interested, as well as,, the journal’s target audience. This illustration the scientists have provided is very helpful to anyone who, for whatever reason, isn’t that knowledgeable about this area of research,

Figure 1 - Your brain in action: the different components of a BMI include the recording system, the decoding algorithm, device to be controlled, and the feedback delivered to the user (modified from Heliot and Carmena, 2010).

Figure 1 – Your brain in action:
the different components of a BMI include the recording system, the decoding algorithm, device to be controlled, and the feedback delivered to the user (modified from Heliot and Carmena, 2010).

As for getting information about basic details, here’s some of what I unearthed. The parent organization, ‘Frontiers in’ is based in Switzerland and describes itself this way on its About page,

Frontiers is a community-oriented open-access academic publisher and research network.

Our grand vision is to build an Open Science platform that empowers researchers in their daily work and where everybody has equal opportunity to seek, share and generate knowledge.

Frontiers is at the forefront of building the ultimate Open Science platform. We are driving innovations and new technologies around peer-review, article and author impact metrics, social networking for researchers, and a whole ecosystem of open science tools. We are the first – and only – platform that combines open-access publishing with research networking, with the goal to increase the reach of publications and ultimately the impact of articles and their authors.

Frontiers was launched as a grassroots initiative in 2007 by scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, out of the collective desire to improve the publishing options and provide better tools and services to researchers in the Internet age. Since then, Frontiers has become the fastest-growing open-access scholarly publisher, with a rapidly growing number of community-driven journals, more than 25,000 of high-impact researchers across a wide range of academic fields serving on the editorial boards and more than 4 million monthly page views.

As of a Feb. 27, 2013 news release, Frontiers has partnered with the Nature Publishing Group (NPG), Note: Links have been removed,

Emerging publisher Frontiers is joining Nature Publishing Group (NPG) in a strategic alliance to advance the global open science movement.

NPG, publisher of Nature, today announces a majority investment in the Swiss-based open access (OA) publisher Frontiers.

NPG and Frontiers will work together to empower researchers to change the way science is communicated, through open access publication and open science tools. Frontiers, led by CEO and neuroscientist Kamila Markram, will continue to operate with its own platform, brands, and policies.

Founded by scientists from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2007, Frontiers is one of the fastest growing open access publishers, more than doubling articles published year on year. Frontiers now has a portfolio of open access journals in 14 fields of science and medicine, and published over 5,000 OA articles in 2012.

Working with NPG, the journal series “Frontiers in” will significantly expand in 2013-2014. Currently, sixty-three journals published by NPG offer open access options or are open access and NPG published over 2000 open access articles in 2012. Bilateral links between nature.com and frontiersin.org will ensure that open access papers are visible on both sites.

Frontiers and NPG will also be working together on innovations in open science tools, networking, and publication processes.

Frontiers is based at EPFL in Switzerland, and works out of Innovation Square, a technology park supporting science start-ups, and hosting R&D divisions of large companies such as Logitech & Nestlé.

As for this new venture, Frontiers for Young Minds, this appears to have been launched on Nov. 11, 2013. At least, that’s what I understand from this notice on Frontier’s Facebook page (Note: Links have been removed,

Frontiers
November 11 [2013?]
Great news for kids, parents, teachers and neuroscientists! We have just launched the first Frontiers for Young Minds!

Frontiers in #Neuroscience for Young Minds is an #openaccess scientific journal that involves young people in the review of articles.

This has the double benefit of bringing kids into the world of science and offering scientists a platform for reaching out to the broadest of all audiences.

Frontiers for Young Minds is science edited for kids, by kids. Learn more and spread the word! http://bit.ly/1dijipy #sfn13

I am glad to see this effort and I wish all the parties involved the best of luck.

California boycott of Nature journals?

It seems the California Digital Library (CDL) which manages subscriptions for the University of  California has been getting a deal on its Nature journal subscriptions and now the publisher, Nature Publishing Group (NPG), has raised their subscription price by approximately 400 percent. Predictably the librarians are protesting the rate hike. Less predictably, they are calling for a boycott.

The Pasco Phronesis blog notes,

The negotiations continue via press releases. Independent of the claims both sides are making, this fight brings out the point that journal subscription rates have continually increased at rates that challenge many universities to keep up. NPG is not the only company charging high rates, it’s just that the long-standing agreement with the CDL has become no longer sustainable for NPG. Given the continuing budget problems California faces, it seems quite likely that the CDL may no longer find NPG subscriptions sustainable.

The article by Jennifer Howard for the Chronicle of Higher Education offers some details about the proposed boycott. In addition to canceling subscriptions,

The voluntary boycott would “strongly encourage” researchers not to contribute papers to those journals or review manuscripts for them. It would urge them to resign from Nature’s editorial boards and to encourage similar “sympathy actions” among colleagues outside the University of California system.

The boycott’s impact on faculty is not something that immediately occurred to me but Dr. Free-Ride at Adventures in Ethics and Science notes,

One bullet point that I think ought to be included above — something that I hope UC faculty and administrators will consider seriously — is that hiring, retention, tenure, and promotion decisions within the UC system should not unfairly penalize those who have opted to publish their scholarly work elsewhere, including in peer-reviewed journals that may not currently have the impact factor (or whatever other metric that evaluators lean on so as not to have to evaluate the quality of scholarly output themselves) that the NPG journals do. Otherwise, there’s a serious career incentive for faculty to knuckle under to NPG rather than honoring the boycott.

There is both support and precedent for such a boycott according to Howard’s article,

Keith Yamamoto is a professor of molecular biology and executive vice dean of the School of Medicine at UC-San Francisco. He stands ready to help organize a boycott, if necessary, a tactic he and other researchers used successfully in 2003 when another big commercial publisher, Elsevier, bought Cell Press and tried to raise its journal prices.

After the letter went out on Tuesday, Mr. Yamamoto received an “overwhelmingly positive” response from other university researchers. He said he’s confident that there will be broad support for a boycott among the faculty if the Nature Group doesn’t negotiate, even if it means some hardships for individual researchers.

“There’s a strong feeling that this is an irresponsible action on the part of NPG,” he told The Chronicle. That feeling is fueled by what he called “a broad awareness in the scientific community that the world is changing rather rapidly with respect to scholarly publication.”

Although researchers still have “a very strong tie to traditional journals” like Nature, he said, scientific publishing has evolved in the seven years since the Elsevier boycott. “In many ways it doesn’t matter where the work’s published, because scientists will be able to find it,” Mr. Yamamoto said.

I feel sympathy for both sides as neither side is doing well economically these days. I do have to wonder at the decision to quadruple the subscription rates overnight as it smacks of a negotiating tactic in a situation where the CDL had come to expect a significantly lowered subscription rate. With this tactic there’s the potential for a perceived win-win situation. The CDL will triumphantly negotiate a lower subscription rate and the publisher will get the increase they wanted in the first place. That’s my theory.