Research Communicator - August 2009

by AlphaGalileo

New subscription rates and renewal offer

We regret that from 1 September 2009 we will have to raise our subscription and advertising rates. This is the first increase since we introduced subscriptions in 2003.

The Basic European level subscription will rise to €990 from €900 (£690 from £600). The new Premium European subscription rates will be €1,650 (£1,150).

Existing basic rate subscribers can upgrade their subscription to the Premium level at the pre-increase price of €1,500 (£1,000) for the 12 months till 31 August 2010. If you would like to take advantage of this offer, please email alphagalileo@alphagalileo.org. Premium level provides auto posting by email - no cutting and pasting - and a mini-site that gathers all your news items and contacts together to clearly present your institution's profile.

Reduced rate offer

If your country has never used the service since we introduced subscriptions we are offering, for a limited period, a reduced subscription rate of €445 a year to organisations from these countries.
The reduced rate of €445 a year is half our normal rate, but we are offering exactly the same level of service as that of our standard rate. The new reduced rate will run for a minimum of two years. To take up this offer please email the News Service Team at alphagalileo@alphagalileo.org.

Eligible countries include:

Albania; Bosnia; Bulgaria; Croatia; Cyprus; Czech Republic; Estonia; Greece; Hungary; Iceland; Kosovo; Latvia; Lithuania; Malta; Romania; Macedonia FYROM; Montenegro; Moldavia; Serbia; Slovakia; Slovenia &Turkey.

Business News

The connection between research and wealth creation is fundamental to creating a knowledge-based society. From 1 September, we are expanding our current coverage of business and commercial news by introducing a sixth news category, Business, with extra keywords beyond 'industry' and 'knowledge transfer'.

Current commercial subscribers, publishers and university spin-offs will continue to attract the academic subscription rates (see above) but there will be new commercial rates for new users. These are €2,000 (£1,500) per year, but provide all the features of the Premium service. Over the next few weeks we will be adding news that has been rejected as commercial in the recent past to the new category.

If you want to receive email alerts on Business News you will need to select the ‘My settings' tab in the top right of the screen once you have logged in. If you do not wish to receive Business alerts you need do nothing.

Erice International School of Journalism and Communication July 2009

Erice, an historic town perched on a soaring hilltop in the far west of Sicily, is the location of the Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture. Housed in several converted churches and convents, the centre has a tradition of hosting high-level research meetings that goes back to the 1960s and meetings of physicists over the threat from nuclear weapons.

The journalism summer school was organised on behalf of Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare by Barbara Gallivotti, an Italian TV journalist. And there was a physics flavour to the journalism school, with participants from ITER, CERN, Fermilab and the Japanese high- energy physics lab KEK. Peter Green represented AlphaGalileo Foundation. In the tradition of Erice, other disciplines were also holding meetings at the same time, and he also provided expert media input to a meeting of representatives from pharmaceutical regulatory bodies.

Peter Green spoke on the challenges facing research journalism from new media and the switch by editors from covering research news by specialists to using generalists. He and other senior media sources all expressed their concerns that the media should not be seen by the research community as a tool of research. The media's role should be to be critical. To behave towards research in exactly the same way as it does to politics, finance, sport or culture. However, in the round table that Peter chaired the last contribution from the floor was from a young science journalist who called for a new concord between the media and research to communicate better the achievements and benefits of research. Was it the cynicism or experience of age in contrast to a dawning new world?

South-Eastern Europe facing the knowledge society - meeting highlights

AG was invited to the Euroscience special meeting held in Split from 14 to 17 July to discuss the preparatory work for the meeting of young scientists from South Eastern Europe in Sofia in April 2011.
Georges Waysand and Raymond Seltz, from Euroscience , explained what the main goals are to young scientists and students from Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece and Serbia. Kosta Stefanov, from AG, shared his views about Science Journalism in SE Europe and how AlphaGalileo is working with organisations in these countries.

The meeting was a brainstorming session with plenty of ideas on how to make the Sofia Conference in 2011 a more bottom-to-top meeting and to let young scientists express their views and ideas more freely.
One of the main thoughts put on the table was the question of problem solving through science or "Science helps building bridges". This question is very relevant in SE Europe as the scars from the Yugoslav wars are still fresh and there are still problems to solve like the name issue between Greece and Macedonia - FYROM, and between Kosovo and Serbia.

Another topic was about the problems of ecology and climate change in all countries in the region and trying to find common solutions for them.

Many of the issues concerning the young scientists in SE Europe were also exposed during the meeting, like underfunding, lack of interest on the part of the local governments, top-to-bottom approach in the universities and institutes (remnant from the totalitarian system), lack of knowledge about what is going on in the region as a whole, no links between the research and the real world (e.g. businesses), no interest in innovation, etc.

Four different committees have been created for the organization of the meeting in Sofia.

Success stories: IRD - At the service of Southern countries

The IRD (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement) is a French public science and technology research institute which is unique in the landscape of European research for development: for over sixty years it has conducted scientific programs contributing to the sustainable development of the countries of the South, with an emphasis on the relationship between men and the environment.
The IRD has been working with AlphaGalileo for many years. They post items in French but also in English and in Spanish, which always generate a great interest among our journalists. Vincent Coronini, attaché de presse, says: "AlphaGalileo represents for us a great way to share information by distributing our news items to a wider audience. That is a real need for an organization like ours which has 40% of its permanent staff posted abroad".

The IRD's structure is based on 97 research and service units; it has establishments in 23 tropical countries.

Feature: ‘Oyster' heralds new wave of green power

A giant new machine called 'Oyster' designed to harness the power of ocean waves and turn it into ‘green' electricity is being installed on the seabed off the Atlantic shores of the Orkney Islands. In autumn 2009 it will undergo demonstration trials to prove whether its innovative technology could lead to a commercial source of renewable energy for use in seashores around the world. Read more...

Hits Parade

Did you know the archaeon Haloferax volcanii? You should! It is a microscopic single-celled organism which could help scientists gain a better understanding of how cancer cells behave and brings new insights into the repair strategies of DNA. This story is at the forefront of our Top 5 news last month, followed by the longest solar eclipse of the twenty-first century we could view through Internet and throughout the world! There were more: the Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science has been published, it assembles for the first time concepts and tools for analyzing complex systems in a wide range of topical areas; and the announce of the 22nd ENCP Congress which will focus on discoveries in brain research and mental disorders in September.

Read our Top 5 news!

1. Surprising new insights into the repair strategies of DNA - University of Nottingham - 15/07/2009
2. El eclipse solar más largo del siglo XXI podrá verse a través de Internet en todo el mundo - Facultad de Informática de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid - 08/07/2009
3. A complete view of complexity in science and society in a new reference work - Springer Science+Business Media - 10/07/2009
4. 22nd ECNP Congress - promoting new discoveries in brain research and mental disorders - European College of Neuropsychopharmacology - 10/07/2009
5. The 21st century's longest total solar eclipse to be Internet broadcast worldwide - Facultad de Informática de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid - 09/07/2009

Congratulations to Facultad de Informática de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, who made it twice to our top five with the story of the solar eclipse in two languages.

Staff picks:

Are academic papers a thing of the past?

Social networking is not only for bored teenagers or sharing banal information about your life: it is changing our relationships and methods of work. The social networking site for scientists, myExperiment, has received further funding to develop the possibilities of collaboration within the research community using the tools of Web 2.0. The purpose is to "make research more reproducible, reusable and reliable" and "investigating the collision of Science 2.0 and traditional ideas of repositories". In its first year, thousands of users worldwide have approached to the site creating the largest public collection of this kind. For some people this new method to peer review research could be the end of academic papers. Probably others are more sceptical. Do you have an opinion? Read the whole press release of the University of Southaptom...

Swearing can make you feel better

Even the most modest and refined would repeatedly shout that ‘bad' word when hurt. It is commonplace to swear as a first reaction to pain. But why is it that we do it? Researchers at Keele University have the answer to this: swearing can actually increase your pain tolerance. To test their theory, they recruited some volunteers and asked them to submerge their hand in a tub of ice water (ouch!) for as long as possible while repeating a swear word of their choice. They carried out the same exercise with a neutral word. Read more about this curious story...

The Savvy User's Corner

Did you know...

• ...that the whole site is set on Greenwich Mean Time GMT? As (summer & winter) times vary over the course of the year, GMT provides a constant time reference point. At the moment British Summer Time (BST) is one hour ahead of GMT and Central European Summer Time (CEST) two hours ahead of GMT. This means that e.g. 23.01 on Friday 7 August 2009 GMT corresponds to 00.01 on Saturday 8 August 2009 BST / London time and 01.01 on Saturday 8 August 2009 CEST / Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Rome time. This is especially important for embargoed news. When contributing an embargoed release, please remember the GMT setting and, to avoid confusion, you might want to mention the corresponding time conversions in the Notes to Editors section.

• ...that the account manager for contributing organisations can now update the company profile and upload new logos? After logging on, the account manager should go to the tab MY SETTINGS and click on VIEW MY ORGANISATIONS SETTINGS. You can then edit your company's short description, contact details and delete / upload a new logo.

And of course, you can always write to the duty editor on alphagalileo@alphagalileo.org, who will be happy to help or point you in the right direction.

Social Media

Finally, just so that you know, you can now follow us in Twitter and join our group or become a fan of AlphaGalileo in Facebook. Hope you enjoy it!

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