Social media tools and academic publishing, a presentation by Alan Cann

The following video is a presentation by Alan J. Cann for Editing in the Digital World, 11th EASE General Assembly and Conference Tallinn, Estonia, 8-10 June 2012.

Abstract of the presentation as published in the conference programme:

Social media tools and academic publishing

Alan J. Cann, Internet Consulting Editor, Annals of Botany; Department of Biology, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

As publishing moves from print-focused (slow, inflexible, expensive) to content-focused (digital delivery, article-level metrics/discussion), there is an increasing need for publishers to communicate with their audiences in ‘adjacent spaces’ beyond the traditional medium of the journal or book. Social technologies will continue to evolve rapidly for the foreseeable future, so publishers need to acquire sufficient expertise to remain agile in this area in the face of future developments. I will describe the Annals of Botany low-cost online social media strategy, which is extending the reach of the journal to new audiences and new demographic groups. This includees blogs as distribution hubs for content via RSS, Twitter and Facebook, and emerging tools such as Flipboard which allow content discovery on new platforms such as tablet computers.

And here you have a link to the AoB Blog.

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Want to have some fun? Do some peer reviewing for a scientific journal!

Every December, the journal Environmental Microbiology publishes a collection of humorous quotes made by peer reviewers while assessing manuscripts submitted to the journal. Some of them are hilarious! I am extracting a few of them from the last two years, but I recommend reading them all!

Here you go:


Desperate referees:

This paper is desperate. Please reject it completely and then block the author’s email ID so they can’t use the online system in future.

The biggest problem with this manuscript, which has nearly sucked the will to live out of me, is the terrible writing style.

The writing and data presentation are so bad that I had to leave work and go home early and then spend time to wonder what life is about.

The finding is not novel and the solution induces despair.

Desperate authors:

WOW! You did ‘read it with interest’ in SEVEN MINUTES??!! [Ed.: this is an author contribution in response to an editorial decision (rejection) made within 7 min of submission]

Holiday season:

Done! Difficult task, I don’t wish to think about constipation and faecal flora during my holidays!

The peaceful atmosphere between Christmas and New Year was transiently disrupted by reading this manuscript.

Merry X-mas! First, my recommendation was reject with new submission, because it is necessary to investigate further, but reading a well written manuscript before X-mas makes me feel like Santa Claus.

Season’s Greetings! I apologise for my slow response but a roast goose prevented me from answering emails for a few days.

Technical issues:

[...] maybe some beetle took a pee on one or the other of the samples [...]

You call the sample fresh water, this is confusing as it is saline water.

The trees are crap but, besides this, excellent work.

Writing style:

You know there is something important there but the language is so inaccessible that you cannot make up your mind if they are trying to hide something or they actually think that is a good style of writing.

This manuscript gets the title ‘worst written manuscript of the year reviewed by DJ’

The writing style is flowery and has an air of Oscar Wilde about it.

Great manuscripts:

This is a long, but excellent report. [...] It hurts me a little to have so little criticism of a manuscript.

I perused this manuscript while in the hotel prior to a friend’s wedding. I was suspicious that a state of relaxation had influenced my enjoyment of a paper on soil formation; so I read it again, this time squashed between two large people on the delayed flight home, and still enjoyed reading it.

Very much enjoyed reading this one, and do not have any significant comments. Wish I had thought of this one.

It is always a joy to review manuscripts such as this. Well-conceived, well executed, well edited. Clean. Pristine. From start to finish.

Links:
- Referees' quotes – 2010. Environmental Microbiology (2010) 12, 3303–3304.
- Referees' quotes – 2009. Environmental Microbiology (2009) 11, 3309–3310.

Image credits:
Image (desperate schoolboy) modified from a photo by Patrick Bell. Source: Flickr. This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

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About the fabulous covers of the Trends journals

You may (not) know that I was the full-time editor of Trends in Microbiology (TiM) for 15 months. During that time, I greatly enjoyed --in addition to other more obvious editorial tasks-- working with our in-house designer, Philip Patenall, for the making of the TiM covers.

The process used to be something like this. First, I chose one of the articles to be highlighted on the cover and suggested a tentative design. Then, Phil and I discussed about how to translate my (often not very clever) idea into a proper design. And, finally, he did (basically) all the hard work.

Note that the image shown here corresponds to a different journal, Trends in Genetics. This is my favourite Trends cover (and that of many other people) of 2009. It was designed by Phil, based on suggestions by the journal editor, Treasa Creavin.

Phil made hundreds of covers and lots of other graphic art for the Trends journals and other scientific publications. See below four examples of the work he made for TiM during 2009. If you want to see more pretty covers, go to the Trends website, choose a journal, and click on the magnifying glass below the cover pic (on the left sidebar) for each issue.



Unfortunately, Phil left his job last November because of a departmental reorganization, so his last covers were those of the December issues. Because my contract ended with the year, then I had the rare opportunity to make my own cover designs for the January and February 2010 issues, in the absence of a dedicated designer. Although I've always been interested in photography and anything visual, and have been using Photoshop for a while, I'm fully aware that I am not a professional designer. I know these covers are not very good but, hey, I enjoyed making them, and wanted to share them with the blogosphere. Here they are:

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Microbial Biotechnology

Microbial Biotechnology is a new scientific journal, published by Wiley-Blackwell and the Society for Applied Microbiology (UK's oldest microbiological society). The first two issues include research articles, reviews, and web alerts, such as:

- Massively parallel pathogen identification using high-density microarrays (research article).

- Metabolically engineered bacteria for producing hydrogen via fermentation (review).

- Renewable fuels. An annotated selection of World Wide Web sites relevant to the topics in Microbial Biotechnology (web alert).

Free access for all issues during 2008.

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This gun shoots golden bullets (and genes)

The first time I read the term biolistic, I thought it was a misprint. Then I found out it was a chimera-like word, with a "biological" head and a "ballistic" body. The term describes a method for introducing DNA into cells by literally shooting them with microscopic bullets, which have been previously coated with the desired DNA. Although the technique is mainly used for the genetic engineering of plants, sometimes it is also employed for animal cells and tissues, fungi or bacteria. I have never used a gene gun, not even been close to one, so I greatly enjoyed the following video from JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments, a video journal for biological research, see note*):

Georgia Woods, Karen Zito. Preparation of Gene Gun Bullets and Biolistic Transfection of Neurons in Slice Culture. Journal of Visualized Experiments (02/13/2008).

The 17-min video is a detailed description of the whole procedure, so it gives you the impression to be there. A written protocol completes the article.



*Note:
The guys at JoVE are working hard to improve their site. Recently, I was informed by Anna Kushnir (JoVE blog) about new and future developments: they have now a convenient RSS feed, signed agreements with a few science publishing companies for joint protocol publication (see example) and they are awaiting for approval to become soon the first video journal to be reviewed by PubMed. Good luck, folks!


Link collection:

• Gene Guns, Davidson College.
• Gene Gun, Wikipedia.
• Development of the "Gene Gun" at Cornell, Cornell University.
• Biolistics, or “Maybe We Could Just Shoot It?”, 90% True.

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Phytochemistry Letters

The Phytochemical Society of Europe and Elsevier have given birth to a new journal, Phytochemistry Letters, which will cover all aspects related to natural products. Submissions from any field of natural product research are encouraged, including: structural elucidation of natural products, clinical efficacy, safety and pharmacovigilance of herbal medicines, natural product biosynthesis and chemical synthesis, chemical ecology, biotechnology, pharmacology, metabolomics, ethnobotany and traditional usage, natural product metabolism, genetics of natural products...
Despite the "phyto-" (= plant) in its name, the journal will not deal only with natural products from plants, but also with those from microorganisms (one of the editors is specifically associated to the subject of "microbial natural products").

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Twisted Picks 2: Science, Poverty and Medicine

This is my second edition of Twisted Picks.

First Pick: Poverty and human development

The Council of Science Editors organized a Global Theme Issue on Poverty and Human Development on October 22, 2007. More than 200 science and health journals participated:

• PLoS Journals: Poverty Collection
• Nature: Poverty and Human development
• PNAS: Poverty and Hunger Special Feature
• Full list of articles published in the journals participating in the CSE Global Theme Issue
  

Second Pick: Pharma companies and medical literature

As read in ScienceDaily, Influence of drug companies on medical literature (Sep. 28, 2007):

"Drug companies control or shape multiple steps in the research, analysis, writing, and publication of a large proportion of the medical literature, and they do so behind the scenes, according to a policy paper recently published in PLoS Medicine"

The mentioned paper is entitled Ghost management: How much of the medical literature is shaped behind the scenes by the pharmaceutical industry?, and is authored by Sergio Sismondo at PLoS Med 4(9): e286. In his own words:

"There are many reports of medical journal articles being researched and written by or on behalf of pharmaceutical companies, and then published under the name of academics who had played little role earlier in the research and writing process [2–14]. In extreme cases, drug companies pay for trials by contract research organizations (CROs), analyze the data in-house, have professionals write manuscripts, ask academics to serve as authors of those manuscripts, and pay communication companies to shepherd them through publication in the best journals. The resulting articles affect the conclusions found in the medical literature, and are used in promoting drugs to doctors"

An interesting discussion can be read in the responses to the article.



And Third Pick: Yes, it's a cruel world

A Favorite Quote of 2007 chosen by Clifford Mintz at BioJobBlog, and pronounced by Christopher Begley, chairman and chief executive of Hospira Inc.:

"Quite simply, life-saving drugs are irrelevant if they are not affordable"

Quite simply, he's right. Unfortunately.

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Marine Microbiology

Following the tide (unintentionally, I guess) of Microbial Week at Deep Sea News, Nature Reviews in Microbiology gives us the opportunity to learn more about the wonderful microbes from the sea, with a new special issue focused on Marine Microbiology. There is FREE online access to all Focus issue articles.

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International Microbiology

If you are a researcher in the microbiology field, you might consider to submit a manuscript to International Microbiology, a peer-reviewed journal edited by the Spanish Society for Microbiology (Sociedad Española de Microbiología, SEM). International Microbiology publishes original research papers, short communications, critical reviews and opinion letters dealing with all fields of microbiology, and it addresses the international scientific community. As a member of SEM, I was glad to learn that the 2006 impact factor for International Microbiology was 2.455, according to Journal Citation Reports (JCR, Thomson-Institute for Scientific Information). It is quite a good score for a microbiology journal after only two years of JCR tracking (its first score was 1.866, for 2005).

Source: Mercedes Berlanga, Associate Editor, International Microbiology. Via NoticiaSEM No. 5, Sept. 2007 (monthly electronic bulletin of the Spanish Society for Microbiology).

Note added on Sept. 6.- I forgot to mention that International Microbiology has an open access policy: articles can be downloaded free of charge (see Open Access. A turning point in scientific publication, Int. Microbiol. 7:157-161, Sept. 2004 issue).

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