So, in some ways, as science has expanded and also become more specialised for scientists themselves, that front half of Nature has become even more important.Īnd its reach, as you say, has expanded hugely as well. In some ways, the papers themselves have become so specialised as science has expanded that they can be somewhat impenetrable, as I’m sure you’ve found if you’ve ever tried to delve into a paper which might be outside your discipline, whereas the news and the opinion content in which we’re discussing broader changes across policy and of course scientific discoveries are aimed to be accessible across the scientific community. I think it’s really interesting what Magdalena says about how communicating science around the world has always been central to Nature’s mission, and even though we have that heavier focus now on the scientific community, communicating and discussing these broader issues around science are absolutely essential to what we do. How has that manifested itself for what you’ve produced? Helen, with you looking after the front half, it’s interesting that Nature maybe started off maybe with a more kind of general audience. Now, Nature itself is kind of roughly split up into two parts – we call it the ‘back half’, which are the research papers, and the ‘front half’, which is the journalism content. Yes, my goodness, a bit of a leap there, absolutely. Now, we’re reaching millions every month. Yeah, interestingly, in the first year of Nature I think we had about 200 subscribers, so that’s another thing that’s potentially changed. Today, we have more than 100 people who come together for that issue of Nature to come out every week and of course also for the online content on a continuous basis. So, you know that very first issue was actually looked after and brought to life by one editor and his assistant. And the third difference that I would bring out is who works on Nature itself. Often papers are authored by multi-author consortia, international consortia and actually, interestingly, sometimes amongst our authors we also have citizen scientists. Today, of course, our authorship community is incredibly diverse. Almost certainly men from particular backgrounds. So, some of the very early papers that we published, the very early communications, were authored by maybe one person, maybe two people at most. The second difference, I’m going to say, is in the authorship. We also publish original discoveries and thereby an important purpose of Nature is to communicate science within the scientific community. Of course, today, that’s an important part of Nature but that’s not the whole of Nature. We were launched to be much more like a magazine, let’s say like Scientific American is today, where the scientists themselves were supposed to write about their discoveries for the general public. Well, first off the mark would be the fact that we were actually launched to be something slightly different from what we are today. Magdalena, if you had to distil down the differences, what would you say are the three biggest changes that have happened in Nature over this century and a half? A lot is the same – Nature is still publishing science – but an awful lot has changed. So, a wealth of experience then on my panel today, and, well, let’s talk about Nature then. I oversee our journalism and opinion content. I am the Vice President of the Nature journals. I coordinate the strategy for the journal and look after the many parts that actually make up Nature itself. I’m Benjamin Thompson and joining me on this time-travelling adventure are Magdalena Skipper… In this edition of Backchat, we’ll be peering back through time at the history of Nature and gazing into the future of what the next 150 years might bring. This week marks 150 years since the first issue of Nature was published on 4 November 1869 no less. Hello, and welcome back to Backchat, our roundtable discussion show where we take a peek behind the scenes of what goes on at Nature.
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