Walking to work this morning listening to BBC Radio 4 I tuned in to two pieces about Nature. They were triggered by the journal publishing the results of an experiment we undertook where we invited scientists to submit their papers for public (as opposed to the more traditional system of confidential reviewing) peer review. You can hear the debate at 7.25am here between the editor of Nature and the editor of an online scientific journal from the charity-supported Public Library of Science. There was also an earlier journalistic piece at around 640am. I've also pasted in below an article from the Wall Street Journal on the same subject.

It's great that a subject so apparently arcane as scientific peer review should be considered important enough to warrant two slots on the most important radio programme in the UK and a feature in the world's leading financial newspaper. What is not so great is that the discussions manage to confuse open reviewing with free access, comment with criticism, freedom of information with free information, an excellent system which catches nearly all attempted scientific fraud with a flawed system which allows fraud to happen, the desire to speak confidentially and openly as opposed to the apparently open but necessarily guarded alternative. In other words and as usual, a tricky and important debate has been reduced to a few soundbites of little value and significant distortion.

On a more immediately important subject, the disgraceful death sentence imposed on the health workers in Libya. Declan Butler has written a professional state of play piece. Do read it and do, if you can, support the resistance to this terrible injustice.

Visitors to this blog may have noticed an omission in the last few days - no progress report on England's attempt to retain the Ashes, the every 18-month cricket battle between Australia and England. A little while ago I suggested that I'd be very happy if England was boringly 3-0 up in the series at this stage and I could claim my winnings (I bet A$500 at 2-1). I was nearly correct. The score is 3-0 but the wrong way round and I have had to concede the bet and any pride in the 2005 victory in England.

The defeat has been crushing but the strange thing is that, apart from the first match where England were completely dire throughout, the other two could have (or even should) have been won at various times. Apart from the obvious talent and professionalism of many of the Australian players I can't help thinking that a significant difference was about leadership. Somehow, England just didn't have it. This is the England manager after the defeat - his face says it all.

For more detail on all this disappointment go to the Ashes on cricinfo. In spite of this gloom - or maybe as an antidote - some cricket books are doing really well in Britain. My favourite, Wisden Anthology,was made Book of the Week in the Sunday Times and garnered this great review in the Guardian. I quote from the beginning of the ST review:

'If Wisden is cricket's Bible, here is the New Testament.'

The book, all 1300 pages and £40 worth, has reprinted and, hallelujah, a major bookshop chain has finally agreed to purchase some copies for sale at Christmas - better late than never. Perhaps they should have read my previous blog and taken note.

Finally on cricket someone sent me this rather unkind joke about England's cricketers.

Billy was at school this morning and the teacher asked all the children what their fathers did for a living. All the typical answers came out, fireman, policeman, salesman, chippy, captain of industry etc, but Billy was being uncharacteristically quiet and so the teacher asked him about his father.

"My father is an exotic dancer in a gay club and takes off all his clothes in front of other men. Sometimes if the offer is really good, he'll go out with a man, rent a cheap hotel room and let them sleep with him."

The teacher quickly set the other children some work and took little Billy aside to ask him if that was really true.

"No" said Billy, "He plays cricket for England but I was just too embarrassed to say."

For a while I was a member of the Athenaeum Club in London's Pall Mall. It is very posh.

There were, however, a number of drawbacks. The food was terrible, women were not allowed into the club except after 6 p.m. The last straw was to discover that 'members may not take off their jackets in the sitting room' - even when the temperature exceeds 30 Centigrade. I resigned.

A few years later I was invited to join the Chelsea Arts Club which is about as different as it can be. It is not posh.

The food is pretty good. Jackets are not compulsory.Women are welcome. Cats are also welcome.

There is a decent snooker table.

And a gorgeous garden,

One of the joys of membership of the club is receiving the monthly chairman's letter. Today's has a nice literary story:

There has, of course, also been a strong literary tradition at the Club with diverse writer and poet members such as A.S. Byatt, Roger McGough, right through to Laurie Lee, for whom we always kept a special supply of Ruddles County behind the bar! The Club has a bust of Laurie Lee sculpted by Lyn Bamber. I will never forget the story that one day Laurie was sitting for the sculpture when he asked  “can you do something about my pendulous lower lip?” to which Lyn reportedly replied “I’m a sculptor darling, not a f***ing plastic surgeon”!

I can't find a picture of the sculpture in question but here is a picture of Laurie Lee in the gorgeous garden.

And here is the marvellous Erich Mendelsohn designed house where Paul Hamlyn used to live and which is immediately opposite the club.

PS from Grumpy old pedant. I saw a sign at Heathrow Terminal 1 yesterday beautifully typeset and printed under the BAA banner:

Everything you purchase now including liquids are allowed on board.

Nobody on the BAA staff could care less.

We are all suspicious of lists, particularly lists based on subjectivity. The newspapers are full of Christmas choices of books. There might be an element of mutual back-scratching, of intellectual snobbery or exhibitionism, or simply puffery. Yesterday I blogged/bragged about one of our titles in the New York Times best of 2006 which is probably the most objective list.

I have since discovered that we publish three of the best ten and here they are.

Danielle Trussoni's Falling through the earth, Rory Stewart's Occupational hazards and once again Claire Messud's Emperor's children.

I hope all our independent bookselling colleagues are stocking these titles as an antidote to celebrity biographies!

Opening today's Sunday Telegraph and turning to the gossip column about books, Literary Life, (which I couldn't link to for some reason) I found the following:

'Congratulations to Claire Messud, the only British author to feature in the New York Times top five most notable works of fiction of 2006.'

If you may follow the NYT link you'll spot that is the top ten novels (although she does appear to be third and thus arguably could be described as being in the top five). But what surpriseme was that she was described as British. I checked on Wikipedia:

'Born in the United States, Messud grew up in Australia and Canada, returning to the US as a teenager. Her mother is Canadian, her father is of Algerian origin, and her sister is French. Messud was educated at Yale University and then Cambridge, where she met her spouse, the British literary critic James Wood [1]. She has taught in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina and in the Graduate Writing program at Johns Hopkins University. Messud was considered for the 2003 Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, but none of the three passports she held was British.'

I double-checked with Andrew Kidd, described by Robert McCrum as the  'charming, sophisticated publisher of the cutting-edge paperback list at Picador' who confirmed that she is not British.

Why am I pointing this out?

I suppose firstly because I'm fed up with journalistic inaccuracy. It's pretty easy to check that sort of fact. Harder to check whether the £12m Jeffrey Archer is supposed to have received as an advance from Macmillan is correct because we don't disclose our financial arrangements with authors. What I can say is nobody should believe what they read in newspapers, particularly when it comes to authors' advances.

Secondly, because the story is a perfect illustration of globalisation in our industry. The New York Times is as important in the UK now as the London Times used to be. The nationality and domicile of an author is becoming irrelevant.

However, the really important thing is that Claire Messud's books are receiving the attention and praise they deserve. It's not too late to buy The Emperor's Children - just check out the reviews.

Incidentally, can anyone help me find a dvd of my favourite poker film, Big Deal at Dodge city (properly known as A Big Hand for the Little Lady)?

In the olden days, when I lived in Oxford and worked at Oxford University Press I was honoured to be made a Supernumerary Fellow of a very new Oxford institution, Green College. I was reminded of those days by the receipt of their alumni magazine, Green College News, this morning.

The creation of Green College was made possible by money from Cecil and Ida Green, the founders of Texas Instruments, and inspiration and vision from Richard Doll. He was convinced that, as medical sciences and adjacent disciplines exploded in importance, traditional Oxford colleges would simply not have the resource to offer scientists and scholars enough support. The only solution was a brand new college. He dedicated his later years to the college and ensured its success not just when he was Warden but in supporting the Wardens who succeeded him.

I spent time with Doll during the publication of a small book originally published by the National Institutes of Health as an extended journal article. We republished in paperback as The Causes of Cancer and sold quite a few copies. Neither Doll nor his distinguished co-author Richard (now Sir Richard) Peto would accept personal royalties. It was small but startingly important and is still the starting point for discussion about the effects of smoking, food and other environmental factors on cancer incidence.

I have always regarded Richard Doll as an example of the very best scientist, very best scholar, very best university politcian, very best person and not a bad wicketkeeper in his prime. I was therefore horrified by the recent attacks on him suggesting that his payment for consultancy by chemical companies threw suspicion on his research findings and statements. This piece by Cristina Odone puts another slant and finishes by saying:

Each age has its mores: we cannot expect the giants of the past to live by ours.

This is true but might imply he did something wrong. Rubbish. Richard Doll has saved more lives through his research than almost any other medical scientist in history. He lived frugally and his earnings went to support Green College and other causes. He nurtured students and encouraged colleagues.The character assassins should  be ashamed of themselves and we should continue to be grateful for human DNA which occasionally produces simply great human beings.

Incidentally here is a key slide of Doll's epidemiological experiment which proved the link between smoking and cancer and a quote from the British Medical Journal:

The study was remarkable in many ways. First was its magnitude. Despite the fact that it started in 1951, when England was still recovering from the economic devastation of World War II, the field of epidemiology was just emerging, and 13 more years would pass until the U.S. Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health, Dr. Doll was able to recruit 34,439 of the 40,000 male physicians in the United Kingdom to participate in the study. Second was its duration. The study spanned 50 years, capturing the time in the subjects’ lives when tobacco use was just starting to show an impact on mortality, and continuing through most of their deaths, when the risk of use again met the risk of no use. This is illustrated in Figure1, which approaches perfection and evokes accelerated heart beats and gasps for air among statisticians, much as Michelangelo’s David does among artists. Third was its execution, which resulted in attrition of only 8.8% over 50 years, an average of 63 people or .147% per year. Finally are the results, which tell us that smoking cigarettes reduces life span by approximately 10 years, and increases the likelihood of death by 100% at age 50, 111% at age 60, 121% at age 70, 45% at age 80, and 26% at age 90 and will be the likely cause of death for two thirds of the people who smoke. It also tells us that quitting smoking adds 10 years to a person’s life if they quit by age 30, 9 years if by age 40, 6 years if by age 50, and 3 years if by age 60.

A reception I attended last night organised by the Publishers Association was held in the Reptile House at London Zoo.

It followed a PA International Division conference on the management and protection of global brands with contributions from Nature's very own David Swinbanks giving away all our secrets about brand extension. Here he is giving away something or other to an Emperor and Empress in Japan.

Also there was Pan's very own futurologist author, Ray Hammond, whose monthly thoughts in Glimpses of the Future are normally unbelievable and then turn out to be feasible and then realistic. The photo below is not Ray.

At dinner afterwards the conversation turned, as it infrequently does, to soccer. Chelsea Football Club's successful manager, Jose Mourinho, refers to himself as 'the special one'. Check out his song on YouTube (fast forward through some of the spoken stuff at the beginning). Apart from his own specialness he also refers to nine of his eleven players as 'untouchables'. The question is who are the untouchables of the book trade, either individuals or organisations. Answers on a postcard, email or comment.

I'll start the ball rolling with Nielsen BookData (without whom we'd know even less about our industry than we do now), the Man Group (who have been so intelligent and generous in their sponsorship of the Man Booker Prize, and of course Jane Friedman of HarperCollins (who is publishing person of the year and responsible for just about every innovation our industry has seen).

On Tuesday I went to Jeffrey Archer's flat overlooking the Thames It must be one of the best metropolitan views in the world. I was there, along with a large number of his friends, for his and Mary's traditional shepherd's pie and champagne pre-Christmas party. It was, as ever, a place to spot politicians and other celebrities and this year the prize specimen was undoubtedly Margaret Thatcher who was just as you imagine her to be. It was a classic example of social networking.

And then on the dreaded early flight to Stuttgart (not a lot of social networking at Heathrow at 6.00am) which was looking good in that wonderfully German gemuetlich way.

On the plane, along with working on some board papers, I read the piece below by Karen Christensen and I have her permission to publish it here - she thinks it's too long and over-complicated but I think it's really worth the read. It describes a not-so-classic example of social networking:

'I'm a lover of old books who also blogs. I grew up in the Silicon Valley but have become a a skeptic when it comes to exaggerated claims made for the social benefits of human-computer interaction. I am fascinated by possibilities of Web 2.0 publishing, but I have shocked friends who are true believers by pointing out that not everyone knows the difference between a wiki and a blog. This article is an attempt to explain these different worlds.

The Evangelists

People involved in social media are almost fanatical about them, while traditional businesspeople seem to dismiss them as fad rather than seeing them as phenomena with truly transformative potential. You've no doubt read the evangelists' claims, heard the shorthand (Web 2.0, the "long tail," the "tipping point"), and probably experienced the tent meeting atmosphere of a lot of conference keynotes. Bloggers who say that we should get rid of all editors and just let the people speak. Internet experts who think that publishers just print books. Overexcited journalists who write, "When it comes to information, the balance of power has truly shifted to the consumer." (One assumes the writer doesn't think his own job should be done by the magazine readers, though.) Web media producers who boast that they do everything online. (Surely not everything?)

When they paint a picture of the future as they see it-a future dominated by online interaction-social-media zealots appear to assume that teenagers (the age group most switched on to social media, and the one the zealots focus on) are going to be doing exactly the same things at 40 that they're doing today. They fail to take into account the fact that teenagers have considerably more free time than 40-year-olds. People with families and careers and community activities, however tech-savvy, can't spend all their free time downloading humorous video clips and chatting in MySpace. If a renowned professor and a high school kid get into a debate on Wikipedia, the student will win. He has the luxury of time, which successful professional people do not. Online, fanatics often rule.

The Skeptics

Then there are the detractors. I'm thinking of the senior business development person who said, "Social what?" when I asked what her company, a major global publisher, was doing to incorporate social media into their online platform. "Oh, sure, we're doing all that," she eventually said, "but that's just icing."

In a way, she was right: users expect core content to be maintained, and when it comes to academic content and business information, stakeholders in the existing models will do everything possible to maintain the status quo. But times, and user expectations, are changing. The value added by that icing is going to be immense, and the companies that realize that using social software isn't just a sop to throw to consumers but something that can genuinely improve their businesses-with greater efficiencies, and far more market understanding-are going to be ahead of the game.

There are two types of detractor. Some are manifestly uninterested in the new technologies and are just hoping that the revolution doesn't happen until they've retired to Santa Fe or the Berkshires. They want to use the Web to connect to peers, but they don't really want any challenges thrown their way.. The others may be quite tech savvy and active on the Internet, but they don't understand the power-and difference-of social media.

Explaining Social Media

The online interfaces that make possible this brave new world are known collectively as social media. Weblogs (blogs) are an example of a social medium in which an individual addresses and receives feedback from a large audience-from the one to the many. Bulletin board systems (BBSs, or forums), relationship management media (sites such as MySpace or Cyworld, or even Mappr), massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), file-sharing systems (for music, photos, and videos), and wikis (for collaborative editing of webpages) are examples of social media in which many people interact with many other people-from the many to the many. Finally, and of particular interest to businesses, there are corporate feedback forums that let people give a company feedback on their experiences with the company's products-from the many to the one.

Interest in these media vary around the world. BBSs are, for now at least, the most important social medium in China, with an estimated 53 million people in China making use of them. They are easy to use and allow for anonymous communication, which, in a restrictive society such as China, gives people a feeling of liberation. The Chinese enjoy the social, community-oriented (as opposed to individualistic) nature of BBSs; in general Chinese people are not so eager to stand out. Blogs are extremely popular, too, but unlike in the United States, they tend to be personal, generally written just for friends and family.

What it's all about is new relationships, and in fact the webs of overlapping relationships we call community (or at least some semblance of it). This isn't for everyone, and some of the reasons for the surge in virtual community is that our world offers less in the way of actual community. Blogs, forums, and relationship management sites provide some of the benefits we used to find in real life public spaces like barber shops and even street corners. They let people:

*        Stay in touch

*        Discuss and debate

*        Share content with friends

*        Share opinions (with ratings and social tagging)

*        Publish content (in the hope that others will find it useful or entertaining-and that expertise or talent will be recognized)

*        Collaborate (in creative writing, building directories and
information sources, and gaming)

Some of these are one-to-many, some many-to-many, and they can be designed primarily as expert to individual (allowing for questions and feedback) or as purely peer-to-peer. Even in peer-to-peer, leaders do arise, and certain people try to dominate. The online world is not without personal conflict and awkward social moments.

Hopes and Fears

So what do these new social media mean, for any media company? That the old top-down ways won't work with many audiences. The entertainment industry is already experiencing this, but close behind are any businesses that depend on a purveyor of abstract knowledge handing down words of wisdom from on high. People these days are much more interested in hearing from someone who has lived through the experience and can describe the problem and solution from a personal perspective-that is, they're interested in hearing from school-of-hard-knocks experts rather than ivory-tower ones. Of course, the danger with experiential expertise is that the stories are anecdotal; they may not reflect overall trends, and people relying on them may miss vital information that a person with "book knowledge" but no experiential knowledge might be able to impart.

People have other fears, when it comes to social media. In the United States, there is much concern about predators online; in the United Kingdom and China, there is more concern about what is termed "Internet addiction." Although the evangelists of social media avert their eyes from the serious environmental impact of computing and mobile devices and from the social and economic consequences of diverting activity from local communities, corporate social responsibility may one day come to include not only improvements in remanufacturing and recycling capacity, but also responsible software and site design.

Many companies are trying to capitalize on the young eyes-and associated wallets-of those who congregate at MySpace and similar sites. But perhaps they should beware: many people don't like too much commercialization, and the MySpace crowd is likely to pick up and move if it feels too hassled-and companies may find themselves chasing their target demographic around cyberspace.

Companies engage with social media to differing degrees. Some love to wait and see. Others proudly announce a blog and then use it to post press releases. Others decide to add every kind of whiz-bang interface they can find, without ensuring that there really is a community-in-waiting. Virtual communities need some initial spark to animate them. Sometimes it's a political issue, or a crisis of some kind. Often there's an offline community, or many small communities, ready to come together in a new way. (There are risks: what if your community-in-waiting is a bunch of annoyed subscribers?)

The Promise and the Problems

An experience I had recently shows both what's wonderful about social media and what the drawbacks are.

At Berkshire Publishing, we use online project management software called Basecamp, and I wanted to post my Outlook calendar so staff, reps, and our publicist could easily access it, in real time. But
Basecamp is built on open source, and Outlook is from Microsoft. I clicked on Help and found myself at a forum, hosted by Basecamp, where people discussed solutions to this problem. I was fascinated. The participants sounded so knowledgeable and cooperative: "I tried your solution and it worked, except -"

The discussion went on for pages, and I felt more and more hopeful. These guys would surely solve the problem, and I would be able to impress my IT guy with having figured this out myself.

But the more I read, the less certain I felt that there was a clear solution that I would be able to execute. Because, you see, there is no editor or publisher to delete the well-intentioned dead ends, to rewrite the explanations that are too long and complicated, and to test the final instructions. Because in a medium like this there are no final instructions.

Forums are full of good ideas and bad ones, and if it's your special subject, and you don't have anything else planned for a rainy afternoon, you might want to while away the time this way. But after first creating trust-key to any social network-the tech forum lost me because it didn't answer my question in a way I could understand. And that is good news for publishers, because it means that they will continue to have a role to play in the world of online and social media.

Part of what publishers do-and what our customers pay for-is to weed out most of the material we see. Most publishers reject 99% of the submissions they receive, and in general that's to the customer's benefit because it saves them time and money and gives them what they want without frustrating searches.

Going Forward

Perhaps the greatest challenge social media pose to corporate media companies is blurred boundaries between producer and consumer. Publishing companies may well need to be more than processors and enablers; the ones that have in-house creative and intellectual capacity and the ability to build active, ongoing relationships with creative people are most likely to take full advantage of social media.

Better technologies are also necessary if we are to have really effective, but affordable, interactivity. And the barriers need to be much, much lower: while the tech-savvy think that everyone can publish now, most people have absolutely no idea what a <strong> tag means and would no more edit a page in a wiki than try to drive a Mac truck. But one thing is certain: whether or not social media will turn out to be our bread and butter, it is far more than icing on the cake.

Karen Christensen is cofounder and CEO of Berkshire Publishing Group, to which readers have turned to for over a decade for award-winning titles on topics of international interest. Karen was senior editor of the four-volume Encyclopedia of Community and oversaw the publishing of Berkshire's two-volume Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction. An expert on Chinese guanxi (business relationships) and online community building, she serves on the board of the content division of the Software & Information Industry Association, and spoke about social media in China at the first Global Information Industry Summit in Amsterdam in September 2006. She blogs
here.'