Acta Naturae – "Chronicles of Nature"? "Nature notes"?

About nature – at the molecular level
Scientific periodicals will develop at the expense of Internet versions, but will not be able to live without paper mediaAndrey Vaganov, Independent Newspaper
"The publication claims to be a leading position in the international market of scientific media and plans to become a leader among scientific journals for a professional audience."

Agree, such frankly ambitious statements, considering that we are talking about the first issue of the Asta Naturae – a new domestic journal about research in the field of living systems and biotechnology, have not been heard for a long time. And there is no way to avoid analogies with the legendary British edition of Nature. Roll calls are obvious even in the names. Such statements oblige a lot. The head of the Asta Naturae project, Rem Petrov, emphasizes that for him this project is a combination of two different fields of activity.

"I have lived two lives in my professional career. The first part of my life was when I worked at the Institute of Biochemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in the Laboratory of Engineering Enzymology. There I defended my dissertation and became a candidate of biological sciences," says Rem Petrov. – The second part of my life is connected with "gloss". I worked as the editor-in-chief of Playboy and GQ magazines and was the CEO of InStyle magazine." The experience is truly unique. It was all the more interesting to talk with Ram Petrov about the prospects of scientific periodicals in Russia.

– Ram Ramovich, how can you translate Acta Naturae – "Chronicles of Nature"?

– This is one of the options. You can do it like this – "Natural notes". By the way, at first we wanted to call the magazine "Living Systems". But then we decided to keep this name for the next edition, which, maybe, we will publish in B2B format. That is, not so much scientific as Acta Naturae, as dedicated to technology and related business.

Acta Naturae was conceived precisely as a fundamentally new scientific journal that has no analogues in Russia. The main feature of the publication is an interdisciplinary approach, because in order to develop biotechnologies at the modern level, it is necessary to ensure the interaction of specialists working in many branches of science – medicine, biology, physics, chemistry, computer science, biopharmaceuticals. Meanwhile, breakthrough research in these branches of science is already going on by itself at the junction of different branches of knowledge.

Life sciences, life science, is a whole "bush", a kind of complex of living sciences, but we in the journal Acta Naturae concentrate on the molecular foundations of these sciences. Simply because if we continue to develop medicine, pharmacology, and some subtle biotechnologies related to environmental protection, all this requires research primarily at the molecular level.

– Nevertheless, why did you need another scientific journal? – Yes, of course, there are excellent, long–existing respected journals - "Biochemistry", "Molecular Biology".

But if you look at how many scientific journals are published in the world, it becomes clear that no one can have a monopoly here. Our journal is another platform for research reports. The more high-quality scientific journals, the better for the development of science, for the development of society. We proceeded from the fact that there is a free niche for this. Science has been going through hard times in the last 10-15 years. Now, we hope, a new stage of its development is beginning, and we would like to participate in this process.

– Is there such a thing as "competition" in relation to scientific periodicals? And if there is, what kind of resource is there competition for? – The competition in this case is most likely for the impact factor.

In other words, for the fact that the messages published in a particular journal are quoted. And this competition, as you understand, is significantly different from traditional economic or political competition.

The journal, in order to have a good weight in the scientific community and, consequently, a high impact factor, must first of all monitor the quality of published materials. That is, the competition is for high-quality materials and publications. And in this regard, we can say that there is the same competition in scientific periodicals as in ordinary journals.

Another thing is that in socio-political periodicals, competition takes place not only at the level of content, content, but rather at the economic level. A huge number of marketing factors, economic factors, who is better to agree with the distribution system, and so on are mixed in here. That is, we are talking primarily about the success of the commercial plan.

In scientific periodicals, success is measured by the authority of the publication in the scientific community.

– About the impact factor. In Russia, the first attempts are still being made to create a national rating system based on the impact factor of domestic scientific journals. But basically, when they talk about the impact factor, they mean the indicator generated by the American Institute for Scientific Information (Institute for Scientific Information). ISI indexes several tens of thousands of scientific journals. And how do they get into this monitoring? Is your journal already included in the ISI reviews? – We just started publishing.

The first issue of Acta Naturae was published. In order to get into the field of view of search engines that calculate the citation index, you need to go through some stages. We are doing this. In the near future, of course, we will get into all the significant search engines. Then the struggle for the impact factor will begin.

Science has long been international. Our magazine is also international: we publish it not only in Russian, but also in English. It is clear why this is happening: English is the international language of science. If you are not published in English, you are not visible in the world. A science that is not international is not a science in principle. I'm not talking about closed special studies right now.

In general, I adhere to the point of view that if the results of the work of a scientific group are in no way in demand and are not cited by the international scientific community, then it can be assumed that this group is conducting not very correct and uninteresting scientific research. Or leads the right and interesting, but gets insufficiently significant results. That is, to say that there is some special Russian science, but it is not quoted because of some international conspiracy, is a naive approach.

– Acta Naturae is not "sanctified" by the logo of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Does this somehow affect – or may affect – the impact factor of the journal? After all, abroad, it seems to me, they are used to the fact that in Russia science is primarily an Academy of Sciences. And you, it turns out, are some kind of free shooters… – Firstly, among the founders are not only our Publishing house "Park-Media", but also the Federal Agency for Science and Innovation, Lomonosov Moscow State University.

This initially gives weight and fundamentality to Acta Naturae. But, you see, for the foreign scientific community, the formal affiliation of the publication is not important – the Ministry of Education and Science or the Academy of Sciences ... The main thing is the quality of information: who writes articles in this or that magazine.

Secondly, if you look at the authors of the first issue of Acta Naturae, you will see that more than half of them work in academic institutions. If we look at the editorial board and the composition of the editorial board, we will see that most of these people are either employees of academic institutions, or academicians and corresponding members of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Thus, the chairman of the editorial board of the journal is Academician Anatoly Grigoriev; the editors–in-chief are Corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Gabibov and Corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergey Kochetkov.

So although there is no formal foundation and presence of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Acta Naturae, but those people who make this journal write their reviews and articles – they are mostly directly related to the RAS.

– So it turns out that today any group of comrades who have sufficient start-up capital can establish a scientific journal? –That's right.

We live in a free society. Any economic unit can publish a scientific journal. Not only in biology, for example, but also in clinical medicine. Why not. Everything will depend on the team of authors and the quality of the editorial board's work to attract good authors to cooperation.

– And yet: did you conduct any marketing research, focus groups, before taking up the publication of Acta Naturae? How can you be so sure that such a publication is needed today in the market of scientific periodicals? – Let's say we decided to publish a magazine for 25-year-old women.

A focus group is being assembled – women of this age group. They are shown a certain draft of the magazine: it will contain this and that. In our case, this is not possible.

You can gather ten heads of laboratories and tell them: we want to make such and such a journal. And what to show them? A list of scientific articles that someone has written for this publication? This problem has no solution.

And the solution suggests one very simple thing. A certain team of sufficiently experienced, responsible and well-known people in the scientific world gathers, who at the same time come to mind that it is possible to make a new scientific publication. This is both a focus group and a group of organizers. Who else can evaluate the new project more professionally. So, I think the whole focus group is initially indicated in the output of Acta Naturae - the editorial board, the editorial board.

Here it is also necessary to note this detail. Living systems is an area of science that even in Soviet times enjoyed the attention and support of the state. This was primarily due to work on defense topics: the development of biological weapons; research related to the influence of chemical and nuclear weapons on living organisms. This was the reason for such serious attention to physico-chemical biology.

I do not believe that in the present conditions a scientific journal can arise only on the enthusiasm of a certain number of scientists. The money may come from the state, which is interested in reviving research and innovation activities. It is clear that for this it is necessary to provide information support. It is for this reason that our magazine was organized. Acta Naturae is a consequence of the great state interest in the development of this innovative sphere.

– Do you, as a publisher, set a task to achieve self-sufficiency or even receive income? – In the future, of course, such a task is being set.

I think it is possible to reach a level of income that allows the journal to depend not so much on the state – now Acta Naturae is issued with the money of a grant received from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation – as on the scientific community, from those commercial, entrepreneurial companies and structures that are associated with this scientific community. Accordingly, the sources of income are traditional – subscription and advertising.

– I have not yet seen a single Russian scientific journal with as much advertising as, say, in the same Nature… – And no one has set such a task for our magazines.

If we talk about advertising, then the advertiser is interested in two things: firstly, in getting his information into the right hands; and secondly, the activity of advertisers depends on the quality of the information product itself. For example, for advertisers, such media as pdf files is not the channel that they consider acceptable for themselves. These people are conservative and trust printed media. Hence the filling of printed versions of Nature or Science with advertising.

I'm saying things now that don't seem to coincide with the generally accepted trend. And the generally accepted trend is this: the Internet is the future, traditional printing is dying, and so on. But these conversations have been going on for many years, this is a kind of universal faith, which is still very poorly implemented in practice…

– And not only in Russia, but also in America, in England, in Scandinavia… – Yes, you are absolutely right.

If this were true, then none of the publishers would print these magazines at a loss. If the whole question was only about selling content as such, then why print Cosmopolitan magazine? Everything could be posted in electronic format; any consumer can print any article that he liked in a format and quality convenient for himself… But this is not happening. The print press still exists.

– It's really intriguing: why does a person still prefer to buy paper editions? Why is it important for the reader to get not only visual, but also tactile sensations?.. – Because when you buy something physically definite, you buy something that's not going anywhere.

And when you look at the monitor, you only see the flow of electrons.

Yes, from the point of view of archiving some information, everyone has long since switched to electronic format. It is clear that it is more convenient to store two hard drives in your desk drawer than racks with clippings, photocopiers, etc.

All these seeming paradoxes with the continuing life of printed publications are not related to the fact that they really represent some kind of eternal value - in a fire everything will burn: both the hard drive and the paper. But it is the organoleptic component, when a person buys something that can be held in his hands, I think that some basic instincts of human nature are involved in this. And they, these instincts, continue to play a very important role. Therefore, there are still books, there are magazines. What you can pick up differs in a very strong qualitative way from electron flows.

The Internet is a way of archiving information and a way of navigating this information. And a newspaper, magazine or book is a way to satisfy the deep psycho–physiological needs of human nature. And they will not die off until people completely move into some kind of matrix state.

– But nevertheless an electronic version of Acta Naturae is provided? – Yes, of course.

Any user can download the pdf version and print it. But why do it if you have already done it all for you, and very beautifully done.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru09.09.2009