Building expert communities: Nature Publishing Group and Zapnito partner
London | 30 July 2015
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Zapnito today announced a collaborative partnership to build online expert communities for global research. NPG will use Zapnito's platform and expertise to create communities for journals, training, events and conferences. They will bring together interdisciplinary groups of experts to tackle complex problems, as well as supporting scientists in their work and career development.
The partnership kicks off with an expert community aligned to open access journal npj Biofilms and Microbiomes (npjbiofilmscommunity.nature.com), published in partnership with Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and the Singapore Centre on Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE). Joe Bennett, Publisher for npj Biofilms and Microbiomes said of the new community: "As science moves forward, cross-disciplinary discussions become crucial. We see the npj Biofilms and Microbiomes Community as an important enabler of such discussions, allowing researchers to interact in new, productive ways as we seek to understand more about the mechanisms governing the social behaviour of microbial biofilm populations, and their impact on life, human health, and the environment."
Further expert communities are planned to connect NPG's audience of over 10 million researchers, educators and policy-makers, as well as the ever-curious public.
"We know great ideas, and great progress, come when you get great minds together in a room," said Steven Inchcoombe, CEO of Nature Publishing Group and Palgrave Macmillan. "Our communities will provide online 'rooms of experts'. We're not trying to create broad social networks - there are plenty of those - this is about bringing focused communities together without all the noise. We want to foster and continue the conversations that are already happening, and provide development and collaboration opportunities for researchers around the globe."
Inchcoombe describes NPG's partnership with Zapnito as an "experimental collaboration, through which we continue to learn what our expert communities need and value, and evolve how we deliver that. This is another step in our move from a content-centred approach to research communication, to one that puts the researcher at the very centre of our approach and our services."
Founded in early 2013, Zapnito enables organisations to create focussed knowledge communities. "We are very excited about this partnership with NPG. Bringing to life important knowledge communities in science and the humanities is in line with the company’s innovative philosophy. As a pioneer, NPG recognises the need to reclaim and build expert communities in a new era of knowledge sharing. This will enable NPG’s audiences to learn from their experts in a more powerful and efficient way," said Charles Thiede, Co-Founder and CEO of Zapnito.
"We're no strangers to 'online communities' at NPG, having experimented with Nature Network and other services in the early days of social media. More recently we have worked with Frontiers to enable our authors to easily join Loop, which we continue to support," continued Inchcoombe.
"We learnt from Nature Network and other early experiments that the best way to build these exciting new services is to work with a best-in-class partner. Zapnito ticks all the boxes for us: we bring the experts, they bring the fit-for-purpose digital 'room' in which those experts can collaborate and learn from each other. Charles worked with us at Nature Publishing Group, so I knew from the outset Zapnito understood our approach, as well as the real-world communities it is our privilege to talk to and work with every day at NPG."
Contact
Grace Baynes
Head of Communications
Nature Publishing Group/Palgrave Macmillan
T: +44 (0)20 7014 4063
g.baynes@nature.com