Andre at Biocurious points out an interesting piece in Nature. They interviewed four prominent SF authors--Paul McAuley, Ken Macleod, Joan Slonczewski, and Peter Watts about biology in science fiction. The resulting article is a good read, with lots of interesting anecdotes and examples, and if you go to the supplementary information page for the article, you can get a longer version, including bits that were cut out of the print edition.
That is, of course, assuming that you are surfing the Web from an institution that happens to have a site license for Nature, or have a personal subscription. If you're just an ordinary schlub with a computer, it'll cost you $30 to buy the article. And allow me to save you some money: It's an interesting piece, but no way is it $30 worth of interesting.
It's a shame, really, because the whole issue is devoted to marking the 50th anniversary of the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, with a bunch of articles on the topic (helpfully linked from the lead editorial) that all look interesting. I consider them unbloggable, though, because every one of them is behind that paywall.
I've heard people say that Nature is one of the few publishers that "really gets Web 2.0." I think this is based on the fact that they host several blogs, but really, blogs are not the be-all end-all of the web (or even the annoyingly buzzwordy "Web 2.0," whatever that is). As long as they charge $30 to read a four-page feature story online, they don't "get" the web in any meaningful sense.
or even the annoyingly buzzwordy "Web 2.0," whatever that is
I'm with you on that annoyance. Here's my take on it:
http://brahms.phy.vanderbilt.edu/~rknop/blog/?p=146
As long as they charge $30 to read a four-page feature story online, they don't "get" the web in any meaningful sense.
I'm also with you on that one.
-Rob
I would dearly love to purchase online access to Nature for my library. It's a good site, digital subscriptions are now the norm in the sciences, and as nice as the print issue is, only one person can use it at a time.
We can't afford it, though. The institutional site license is just too expensive. (We do have rolling one-year-delayed access through various subscription services, but that's fairly standard.)
SCIENCE FICTION about ECOLOGY and BIOLOGY
Two leaders in Science Fiction explorations of Ecology and Biology are Frank Herbert ("Dune"), and Joan Slonczewski. Frank has, sadly, passed away (or been recycled). Joan is currently a Professor of Biology at Kenyon College, and is very effectively using Science Fiction books and films as tools for teaching Biology at the college level....
Some questions we study include:
* How do living organisms grow and reproduce? (Tribbles, TV: Star Trek)
* What forces shape the evolution of species, including our own? Could humans evolve into something very different? (novel: Galapagos, by Kurt Vonnegut)
* What kind of planet is needed for living things and ecosystems to evolve?
(novel: Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson)
* What would a desert planet look like? (novel: Dune, by Frank Herbert)
* How does genetics create us--and recreate living things?
(novel: Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton)
* Could genetics make us immortal? (novel: The Children Star, by Joan Slonczewski)
* What if an alien invader tried to do us in--from within?
(novel: Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton)
* What if the aliens decide they like us--too well? (novel: Dawn, by Octavia Butler)
[Biology in Science Fiction: Syllabus by Prof. Joan Slonczewski].
Prof. Joan Slonczewski describes her required reading list as follows...
I'm home this weekend, so the main article is behind the pay wall for me. However, I can access the supplementary page, and can download the .pdf of the extended article without any problem. So at least everyone can read that.
What I especially hate about Nature's access is that the web page you get when you don't have a subscription doesn't include the title or the abstract of the article. If I arrive from a link in a blog post, that means I have to dig to find the article information (title, authors, page number) so I can read it on paper.
In this case the supplementary information actually turns out to be freely accessible in this case, although there is no indication of that. I almost didn't click on the pdf link, assuming that it was behind the same subscription wall as the original article, but as it happened I did. I would guess that most people never get that far. It seems like it would be trivial on Nature's part to at least mark or highlight the items that don't require $$ to access.
Folks, Peter Watts has the article you're looking for here.
I would agree with you if you would criticize Nature for not trying harder to move to open access. I publish open access whenever I can myself. What I disagree with you is about new web technologies. Publishing online enables much more than free and reusable content. It should really lead to an increase in science production by effectively using the web for collaboration, open peer review, etc. Nature and PLoS are the only ones producing new products to make this possible. Among the two it is only fair to say that Nature is leading the way. So, Nature does get this "web 2.0" and it is not because they have a bunch of blogs. It is because of Postgenomic, Scintilla, Nature Precedings, Nature Networks, Dissect Medicine, and a several collaborations on databases and topic pages.
I would agree with you if you would criticize Nature for not trying harder to move to open access.
Open access isn't one of my pet causes, so I'm not that upset about it. I'm not fond of Nature's policy that posting to the arxiv counts as "prior publication," but they may have eased off on that since the last time I had reason to check their policies.
Also, at least in the case of "Precedings," "leading the way" appears to mean "catching up to where physics was ten years ago"...
They have changed that policy. I agree with you on arXiv and they also said the same when they presented the service. That is why Precedinds does not take anything that is already covered by arXiv.
I was not even saying that those products are the most original and interesting web tech products (like Zoho, Google, Facebook products etc). Just that you said that Nature does not get the web and I think we should give them the credit of being one of the few science publishers that are trying.