Nicola Jones, previous online news editor and now acting essays editor for Nature, will take you ‘behind the scenes’ of this top scientific journal during a three-hour workshop on Friday, January 16, 2009, from 1:00 to 4:00 pm in Room 104 at the UBC School of Journalism.
In the first hour, you’ll get a review of how Nature commissions, reviews, edits and publishes everything from the research papers through the opinion section to the news, along with a guided tour of how Nature is adapting to the new online world (from blogs through to Nature Network) — the ‘Facebook’ for scientists). After a break, in the second hour, hear about Nature’s role in dealing with hot science papers and scandals, from physicist Hendrick Shoen’s fraudulent papers, through to the controversial find of Flores man (the tiny ‘hobbits’ of Indonesia), to Woo Suk Hwang’s faked stem cells. The remaining time will be reserved for discussion and, time permitting, an exercise for the journalism students.
