This year’s CSHL Annual Symposium is nearly upon us. The subject for 2008 is Control & Regulation of Stem Cells and the meeting begins on Wednesday, May 28. Sadly I’ll be out of town speaking at the Society for Scholarly Publishing meeting in Boston. If, like me, you can’t attend, be sure to visit the website put together for the Symposium by CSHL’s Meetings & Courses office, which will feature video interviews of the key players in the field of Stem Cells. Also, the volume of collected papers from last year’s Symposium, on Clocks and Rhythms is now available (also online for subscribing institutions).

Yet another entrant into the fray, ResearchGATE (found via Bora’s blog). As usual, I’m not sure what the point is, or how this particular site will differentiate itself from all the others. I’m particularly pessimistic, given their mission statement:

“Instead of disseminating scientific results in regularly scheduled and printed journal issues, now a continuous release of articles in online format will change and expedite the way new results are spread. Without anonymous review processes, open access journals or wiki-like concepts will assure the quality of science. Hidden conglomerates of various interests will give way to transparent and traceable new concepts of scientific impact measurements. Science is collaboration, so scientific social networks, wikis and other means of collaboration will facilitate and improve the way scientists collaborate.”

Which is well-intentioned, to be sure, but strikingly naive and unrealistic.
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Catching up with some recent interesting articles:

First up, Penguin Books reports on their experiment to allow the “wisdom of the crowds” to write a novel “wiki-style”. The results? A really, really awful novel.

A blog entry from O’Reilly from last December on the economics of e-books. I keep seeing a lot of articles and comments assuming that paper/print/binding is the majority of costs in book production, which simply isn’t the case. This article gets a little deeper into the math for pricing e-books, and how they may not end up as cheap as many expect.

The First Author blog notes that Wikipedia is starting to experiment with expert-vetted content that will be locked and not available for editing by readers.

And finally, a nice series of articles by Sara Lloyd at MacMillan on considerations for book publishers in the digital age.

While it always gives an editor a warm feeling to publish the newest groundbreaking protocol from the bleeding-edge of science, it often takes a good amount of time for these types of methods to trickle into mainstream use. Many labs don’t have access to the specialized equipment or reagents called for, and sometimes it takes a lot of thought to realize how a completely new assay can be applied to one’s own research. Keeping that in mind, it’s not surprising to see that on CSH Protocols, our methods that see the highest use from our readers are usually the most basic ones, the absolute classics common across all labs. As an example, Ethanol Precipitation of DNA is consistently on our list of most read articles every month.

Because readers are seeking out these basic methods, we’re putting special emphasis on getting more into our collection, and May’s issue has some good additions. Dany Adams contributes instructions for Making Solutions from Dry Chemicals and Hydrated Compounds, as well as Making and Diluting Stock Solutions. You can’t get any more basic than that. These articles come from Dany’s tremendously useful book, Lab Math and are great examples of why it’s a book you should hand to every new student as they enter the lab (along with At The Bench, our other primer for survival in the laboratory).

May also brings a nice set of histology protocols, again covering the basics, including Fixation and Permeabilization, Paraffin Embedding, Decalcifying, Preparing Slides and Coverslips and Sectioning. A protocol for Hematoxylin and Eosin Staining, one of the most common histological stains used is also available.

Expect more of these basic methods in future issues but don’t worry, we’re scouting along the bleeding edge as well.

I’m giving a talk as part of a forum on blogging for science publishers later this month and have been digging through the usage numbers for this blog. I was surprised at what I found. From my subjective point of view, I would have assumed that the various posts I’ve done on publishing and Web 2.0 were by far the most read on the site, as those are the ones that have spurred nearly all the discussion here and nearly all the incoming links. The numbers tell a different story. While yes, a few Web 2.0 posts have gotten a lot of attention (they rank 2 and 4 in page hits over the history of this blog), the rest of the top 10 are all science and protocol related (one exception–a post on the 25th anniversary of Molecular Cloning). The most read post on this blog is one about Keller explants (are there really that many Xenopus development labs out there?), number 3 is about BLAST and number 5 is about DNA/RNA Delivery. This was both surprising and gratifying–the main reason we created this blog was to help expose our protocol articles and to help researchers find the material they need to get their experiments done. People are using the blog as a discovery tool. Presumably the entries in this blog turn up in Google searches and are leading readers to CSH Protocols.

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The May issue of CSH Protocols is now live, and in it you’ll find featured articles on classic techniques for the analysis of chromosomes. With the leaps and bounds being made in epigenetics these days, knowing your way around chromatin becomes even more valuable. This month’s freely accessible articles give you methods for chromosome analysis in Drosophila and in Mouse.

Mapping Protein Distributions on Polytene Chromosomes by Immunostaining takes advantage of the formidable size and structure of the large polytene chromosomes found in Drosophila salivary glands. These easily dissected chromosomes allow mapping of chromosomal protein distributions at very high resolution. May’s issue also contains a protocol for the Dissection of Larval Salivary Glands and Polytene Chromosome Preparation.

The second featured method for May, Karyotyping Mouse Cells, is drawn from the widely used laboratory manual Manipulating the Mouse Embryo. A karyotype is a visual presentation of a cell’s chromosomes, and can be used as a test for quickly identifying chromosomal abnormalities.