The Nature of the Beast

The journal Nature is a rather ambiguous beast. On the one hand, it represents the acme and epitome of the current science publishing system - and hence everything that is wrong with an analogue, profit-based, traditional access approach - and on the other, it is clearly an organisation that is trying harder than most to be innovative and engage with new ideas flowing from Web 2.0, social networks, virtual worlds and even - whisper it - open access.

One of the people there who seems to get this stuff is Timo Hannay, Head of Web Publishing for the Nature Publishing Group: maybe he's working within the citadel. In any case, this interview with him on the Confessions of a Science Librarian blog is well worth reading for the insights it offers into Nature and its gropings towards openness, and one of the main protagonists prodding things in that general direction.