Biotech Geek Blogger goes Nature Stem Cell Blogger at the Niche

In my opinion the Google of science publishing is the umbrella brand Nature Publishing Group. The best indicator of it is the growing number of freshly released beta products making NPG web initiatives a heaven for scientific early adopters. As Timo Hannay, web editor of Nature said in an interview in Spiegel: The core business of Nature is not to produce a magazine,” he says, “but to facilitate the exchange of ideas among scientists.” Indeed, Nature is technologically a step ahead of other publishers in many respects. Let’s take a look at other giant science journals’ websites. (OK, marketing blablah is over, I am not paid for this, I am just simply enthusiastic about the progress.)

I positioned myself here as the Biotech Geek Blogger with an ideal target audience of researchers and IT guys curious about BT things. A clever and fast scientist turned entrepreneur once called me a Google Biotechnologist. Now I realized a bit lately that the niche Google of my profession is called Nature.

I always wanted to participate in a professional group-blog and I had some opportunities in the past. Now I was offered to contribute freely to the Nature Stem Cell Reports’s new blog The Niche. What could I say?

Yes. (And I won’t be the only one.) It is a huge opportunity for a rookie stem cell researcher like me and an ideal way to get in touch with the recent literature and regmed happenings, continuously process it and make it digestible to other people. The agreement is: concerning articles prepared specifically for The Niche, full blog posts will be published there, while excerpts will be published here.

What type of articles will I make for the Niche? Here are the words of my editor (useful for every scientific blogger): “I prefer the more opinionated, popular type article for the blog. However, if you detect something technical in the literature that merits discourse, it would be very useful to make it a blog subject. Just bear in mind that readers will often be from different fields and you should write as you would for Nature– for the general scientist and interested public. So provide a summary, and try to write like a journalist by communicating clearly, succinctly and without jargon.”

Pimm will be staying my web home, of course. And experimental work will be staying my main agenda as I start my first postdoc job in an established stem cell lab in the United States within a week. Big jump.