Over the last few months a new article type has appeared in our table of contents; the Research Briefing. What are they and why have we started to publish them?
It is a truism that one of the functions of a scientific journal, probably the primary function, is to help communicate research findings. However, communication takes many forms and the best approach will differ depending on the audience. What is accessible and helpful for one person may be impenetrable or unsatisfyingly shallow to another. A variety of approaches are needed to get the message across.
Primary research articles are detailed and information dense. However well written and clearly illustrated, they are chiefly for the consumption of experts working in the same or closely-related fields. Whether called Articles, Letters or Brief Communications, we would like to think that all of the research papers that appear in Nature Plants are at least accessible to all plant scientists, and we try to help authors ensure that they are, but we have to admit that the importance of some of our papers is hard to grasp even by that select constituency. Then there are results that have an interest and implications that cry out to be made accessible beyond the community of scientists.
An example of this is the paper by Li et al. in this issue, which reported the successful engineering of a variety of tomato with high provitamin D3 content1. Vitamin D insufficiency is a major dietary problem afflicting over a billion people worldwide, a condition that crops such as these tomatoes would go some way to alleviating. The paper also feeds into the public and legal debate over advances in biotechnology, as these tomatoes were produced by gene-editing rather than the insertion of DNA from foreign sources.
In order to broadcast these findings widely, we worked with our press office to produce and distribute a press release to help journalists cover the story, and to co-ordinate with the press officers at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK where the work was carried out. Fortuitously, the paper was published two days before a bill was debated in the UK parliament that would open the way for the use of gene edited crops in Britain, something that is not allowed in the European Union (EU) and so would have been banned in the UK before its exit from the EU two years ago. The paper was thus big news, being reported by more than 1,200 news outlets in over 41 countries. As Felicity Perry, Head of Communications and Engagement at the John Innes Centre put it, “unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will probably have seen or heard something about the vitamin D tomatoes”.
Press releases are not the only weapon in our armoury when it comes to unpacking a research paper. For work that we feel has broad relevance to scientists, including but not exclusively plant scientists, we will often commission an accompanying News & Views article (for example, the one by Van Der Straeten and Strobbe covering the tomato work2). News & Views are relatively short pieces that both summarize the published advance (the ‘News’ part) and provide a personal evaluation of it (the ‘Views’). We invite scientists other than the authors of the original work to write them, and while the majority relate to primary research published in Nature Plants, some discuss work from other journals that we feel would benefit from the News & Views treatment. A good example is this month’s News & Views from Krattinger and Keller3 on the sequencing of the allohexaploid cereal crop oats (Avena sativa) and their close relatives, as reported in Nature4.
We editors also write Research Highlights, very brief summaries of interesting research published outside Nature Plants that we think our readers might otherwise miss. While for a more personal and, dare I say it, more human view there are the Behind the Paper pieces posted on the Nature Portfolio Community Sites. Currently there is no Community Site dedicated to plant research, and so Nature Plants authors are to be found within other communities. For example, on the Ecology and Evolution Community Site, Christian Schoeb of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland explains what brought him to study intercropping and the yield gains associated with it.
Since March this year we have begun to publish a new type of article, the Research Briefing. These give a two-page summary of a piece of original research published in our pages and will provide a clear picture of the inspiration and implications of the findings that is accessible to all biologists and hopefully beyond. They also include a list of significant related papers, an illustrative figure and comments from both the articles’ editors and independent experts in the field. As you can appreciate, a Research Briefing is a complicated item to put together and so we are relying on the specialist skills of a dedicated team of editors, experienced in handling review publications, to work with our authors to produce them. The latest Research Briefing5 is by Henry Temple and Paul Dupree of Cambridge University, UK concerning their paper on the control of plant cell wall structure and function through polysaccharide methylation6.
Science is too important to be restricted to scientists, and plant science doubly so. We will continue to strive to make plant research understood and appreciated by as many people as possible and with initiatives like Research Briefings, we will continue to find new ways of doing so.
References
Li, J. et al. Nat. Plants https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-022-01154-6 (2022).
Van Der Straeten, D. & Strobbe, S. Nat. Plants https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-022-01158-2 (2022).
Krattinger, S. G. & Keller, B. Nat. Plants https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-022-01169-z (2022).
Kamal, N. et al. Nature 606, 113–119 (2022).
Temple, H. & Dupree, P. Nat. Plants https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-022-01159-1 (2022).
Temple, H. et al. Nat. Plants https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-022-01156-4 (2022).
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Armed for accessibility. Nat. Plants 8, 597 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-022-01193-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-022-01193-z