Nature Publishing Group has disseminated information between scientists for more than 140 years, starting with the prestigious Nature journal. Now, it hopes to reach out to college and high school students, in part because so many of them lose interest in hard science around that time.
“Thirty percent of science students drop out of science programs after their freshman year in college, which is a really alarming statistic” said Nature Publishing Group SVP Vikram Savkar. In some countries, he added, such programs don’t exist at all.
At stake, he says, could be nothing less than the survival of our species.
“If you take a global view of the problems that humanity is facing over the next 50 years, so many of them involve science deeply — sustainability, solving tropical diseases and so on — and so as a company that’s invested in science, we’re very concerned that the next generation is not being adequately trained,” he said.
(via Wired)
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Coming from a publishing background in Academics and Medicine, I can say this appears to be a very promising platform if it can be made ubiquitous in the scientific community. I had a look around the site, and it seems to particularly geared toward genetics, which is not my strongest scientific interest. Still, If we can enhance medical developments with ordinary community input, rather than just the highly criticized peer-review process, let's see if that winds up working better.
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