Nature

The October 14th, 2010 issue of Nature is obviously a good one. It had to be a good one! I usually advocate Open Access but it is always nice to reading complimentary issues of Nature which is Closed Access but is also publishing very good articles about science at the same time. In this issue, I was interested in various topics … First, there is a serie of articles about the US midterm elections and what (US) scientists feel about two years of Obama administration. Obama promised total transparency in American science, a new era of integrity and more freedom for scientists. From what I read, this isn’t the case yet. ...

… And what about both wars against Irak? Title from F.C. Thompson’s correspondence to Nature in Nature 449, 139

In the last post, I told you one of my photo on Flickr was published in an article from Nature Reports Stem Cells. After some discussions with three friends, I decided to write an e-mail to the journal editors basically stating that, although I enjoyed my photo being shown in their journal, they did not comply with one of the two conditions of the CC-by-sa license (the “Share-Alike” part, more details in the copy of my e-mail). I chose this licence for this photo because it is there to give freedom to other people on some material while this freedom stays with the media even if the latter is modified. ...

I was very pleased to see my first publication in Nature( 1), the scientific journal with an impact factor of 26! Well, it’s not really what you can expect (especially if you are one of my two mentors): one of my photos on Flickr, representing a rat eating (or praying?), was chosen to illustrate a summary of UK Academy of Medical Sciences report on animal-human chimeras :-) Click on the thumbnail above to see the full screenshot ...