As a community journal, we at Development place the global community of developmental and stem cell biologists at the heart of our work. This is exemplified at the Node, our online community site where scientists can interact and share information. Thirteen years on from its launch, the Node continues to be a place to share research stories, opinions, job adverts and event listings. You can read more about the ‘vital statistics’ of the Node in our blog post, the Node in Numbers (https://thenode.biologists.com/the-node-in-numbers/highlights/). In this editorial, we review some of our most popular features, as well as introducing some of our newer initiatives.
We hope that many of you are familiar with – and indeed regular readers of – the Node. For those of you who aren't, we encourage you to browse the site, which – alongside our jobs board, events calendar and resources page – comprises blog posts from members of the community. These posts can cover anything relevant to developmental and stem cell research(ers), and, in the past, have included meeting reports, topical discussions, behind the paper stories and society calls. Importantly, anyone can contribute to the website: all you have to do is register and, once your account is approved, you are free to post. We are also happy to discuss posts with users, and to provide editorial and website support; you can contact the Node team at [email protected]. The fantastic engagement of the community has meant that the Node now has an impressive archive of information, and we encourage you to check out our topics pages to help navigate our vast collection. The Node is ever-changing with the new features added as we respond to the interests of the developmental and stem cell biology community.
Although now well established, the Node continues to evolve and to present new regular features. In the past two years, we have launched three new topics on the Node: SciArt profiles, Developing news and Featured resources. Our SciArt profiles have quickly become some of our most popular posts, with almost 14,000 page views for the series since its launch in 2021. Most of the artists that we have highlighted are still active researchers, although some have moved on to focus solely on their artwork. Developing news is a bi-weekly post where we summarise the most talked about science news on social media, with the aim of highlighting timely topics and updating those who do not to interact with social media platforms. Our Featured resource series highlights important resources that are used by, or created/run by, researchers in our community. As well as offering an opportunity to become better acquainted with the tools that the resources offer, we hope this series reminds scientists of the importance of this support. Another series that we will be adding in the run up to our journal meeting on ‘Unconventional and Emerging Experimental Organisms in Cell and Developmental Biology’ is our popular ‘A day in the life…’ series, which gives our readers insights into working with a particular model organism. Please get in contact if you would like to contribute to, or make suggestions for, any of our regular series.
To help us diversify the regular content on the Node in 2023, and working alongside our sister site FocalPlane (which aims to bring together the microscopy and biology communities), we ran a call for regular contributors – correspondents – for the sites. We were delighted to receive so many wonderful applications for the correspondent roles, and choosing from among these applications was a difficult selection. In making our choice, we were looking for scientists with exciting new ideas for the site and those with an interest in developing their science communication skills. We have appointed three Node correspondents, Alexandra Bisia (University of Oxford), Brent Foster (University of Florida) and Dina Myasnikova (University of Tokyo). You can find out more about Alexandra, Brent and Dina in our interviews on the Node, and find their posts collected together at https://thenode.biologists.com/the-node-correspondents/. Over the year, you can expect to hear from them on topics ranging from women in science, unconventional model organisms and science history. We'll be running workshops and webinars for our correspondents throughout 2023, and hope that we'll be able to run the scheme again in 2024.
The Node is also home to the Node Network, a global database of developmental and stem cell biologists. As the Network reaches its third birthday, it has over 1250 members, making it a valuable resource for finding people for professional purposes, such as reviewers, panellists or speakers. The Network is open to anyone in the community, at any career stage, and you can apply to either access the database or enter yourself into the Network. The database is searchable with diversity in mind, and we invite you to use the Network to help diversify conferences, reviewer pools and panels. If you have used the Node Network, or have been contacted through the database, please share your experience and any feedback with us.
One final piece of news on the Node. One of us (H.Z.) has recently moved to a new position within The Company of Biologists and will now be running FocalPlane. ‘I've really enjoyed getting to know the Node community and hearing about all the new innovations in the field, it's an exciting time to be a development biologist. I hope that many of you will join me at FocalPlane, where we showcase the latest news and tools from the microscopy community, which, we hope, might be just what you are looking for to answer your research question!’ We are also delighted to announce the appointment of the new Community Manager for the Node, who starts at the Company this month. Joyce Yu joins us from a Science Communications role at Alzheimer's Research UK and prior to that was a PhD student with Jean-Paul Vincent at The Francis Crick Institute. We're excited to be working with Joyce and you'll be hearing much more from her at the Node in the coming months.
Both the Node and Node Network only work because of the fantastic contributions from the developmental and stem cell biology community. Thanks to all our readers, subscribers and, in particular, our contributors. We are excited to see what you want to share in 2023!
