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Methodological questions, big and small, are at the core of everyone's research, day after day, technology after technology. Now and again, a methodological question even affects an entire field of research—for example, when divergent methodological approaches provide contradicting results or when the misuse of a method in a specific context risks casting doubt on its reliability in general.

We believe that both seasoned users and neophytes—as well as editors—can learn a lot from constructive discussions about these issues. Sometimes a simple clarification from experts will suffice, other times multiple opinions will have to be heard and weighed for a better understanding of the methodological problems at stake.

To facilitate such discussions, Nature Methods is pleased to introduce methagora, an online commenting forum dedicated to methodological topics.

Regularly, the editors will seed a debate by posting a topic and inviting comments. Most often, the topic will be directly linked to a paper recently published in the journal, but we will also consider unrelated methodological issues of importance to a particular community of scientists. And then, we call for your participation!

Commenting is simple. Comments submitted online will be posted after a rapid screen by the editors to ensure that they are relevant, appropriate and free of obvious commercial interests. We encourage, but do not require, authors to sign their posted comments, and we request a valid email address only to allow correspondence between the author of the comment and the editors.

Currently methagora is hosting a discussion on the most appropriate way of minimizing the reporting of false positives in large-scale RNAi screens. We are seeking opinions from a cross-section of the community of RNAi users in the hope of reaching a consensus of best practices that can be used as reference for users and editors.

The second ongoing debate concerns methods to measure protein-protein interactions in the particular case of G protein–coupled receptors (GPCRs). The results presented by Davis and colleagues in this issue (p. 1001), which call into question the widely accepted notion that all GPCRs exist as functional dimers, invite reflections on the native form of these proteins, but also on the methods used to determine their interactions.

We trust you will be interested in these debates and in forthcoming topics. So please visit the methagora site frequently and participate in the discussions. Have your say on the methods at the core of your research!

Methagora can be found at http://blogs.nature.com/nmeth/methagora/