Notes from the Biomass

Free Association is a blog, accompanying Nature Genetics with commentaries in papers therein and in other journals, editorial policies, announcements of editors at meetings, and covering genetics in the media, including blogs. The commentaries by authors are really required for the usual Nature Genetics two-pager that solely consists of numbers and links to the supplementary material.

Free Association is a "real blog", with identifiable authors, trackbacks, comments and a very clean, unNatural layout free of advertisment, all powered by Movable Type. I appreciate its low tone really and prefer this way of commenting to the letters to the editor at BMJ or PLoS Biology.

Comments are reviewed as most publishers gone blogging do. Let's see what happens when things go controversial. I hope that the editors pick up good traditions from the blogs, such as identifying your sources and providing links to content other than your own, which I often miss in the media coverage.

Most likely, this is one of the first blogs that many geneticists will see - and it will a powerful influence for the A-list of science blogs. It might also be helpful in establishing blogs as a serious form of communication in science - that alone would be a good thing.

[Via nodalpoint.org]