Social Media and Scientific Publishing 30 th June 2011 Jo Stichbury Head of Communities, nature.com

What we’ll cover ● About NPG ● Nature Network ● Communities in real life & online ● Facebook & Twitter

About Nature Publishing Group ●Small, family-owned: less than 100 journals in total ●33 ‘Nature’ titles – including 16 review titles ●Magazines including Scientific American part of the ‘family’ ●1000 employees in 17 offices on 5 continents ●28 society partners ●53 academic and society journals ●Online services, databases, conferences/events, multimedia ●We aim to be the best – not the biggest 32% of the top 50 science journals by Impact Factor (16/50); (2009 JCR*) 15 NPG journals #1 in their fields by Impact Factor (2009 JCR) *Source: 2009 Journal Citation Report, (Thomson Reuters, 2010)

Nature Network ● network.nature.com ● Early initiative in social networking for scientists. ● Launched in ● Users can connect or follow each other. ● Engagement through groups, forums, hubs, Q&As. ● Hosted blogs and some staff blogs. ● Very successful user profiles. ● Our community managers have a great reputation for community development and outreach

Nature Network Blogs ● Hosted blogs are the heart of Nature Network ● Blogs discuss aspects of science and what it’s like to be a researcher ● Over 80 active bloggers worldwide: –Mostly independent bloggers –Some NPG staff

Nature Network Forums ● NPG-led discussion: NatureJobs Careers Advice, Ask the Nature Editor ● Independent collaborating groups: ORCID, Science Online London ● Users with shared interests – e.g. Women in Science, Libraries & Information Management ● Users with common location – e.g. Nature India (recent discussions include Indian biotech, plagiarism, brain drain to US)

Nature Network Hubs ● Currently 3 hubs: Boston, London and New York ● Combination of blog & forum for specific location ● Also include events and job listings for the city ● Supplement and promote regional activities

Nature Network Today: Workbench ● Built on OpenSocial as used by iGoogle, Yahoo! and MySpace ● Individual ‘widgets’ (like ‘apps’) connect to various web-based tools or services ● Users can choose widgets & arrange them on Workbench ● External developers can submit their widgets to be hosted on the Workbench ● NPG offers a range of open APIs to allow developers access to our web services

Nature Network: What We’ve Learnt ● A successful experiment in social media ● From the variety of forums, there is no single community of scientists ● People organise around subjects and activities (e.g. conferences, locations, areas of interest) What has changed since Nature Network launched? ● Twitter & Facebook for ‘social’ aspects ● Science blogging has grown and fragmented: –Aggregation of curated, strong science content is as important as offering a blogging platform.

What’s Next? ● Use Network’s hub model to provide a community of communities –Build more hubs make it easier for ‘birds of a feather’ to flock together ● Provide hub leaders with guidance and templates for community development so they can provide their own community management

Example Community: lindau.nature.com ● Social media site for the Lindau-Nobel meetings ● Blogs ● Q&A ● Video ● RSS aggregation ● Sharing through social media

Social networking: in person, too

Science Online London

Social media/web 2.0 at NPG…

NPG examples

In article link outs to social media

Thank you! Questions?