As you may or may not know Nature Protocols has a Discussion Forum where anyone having problems with their experiments can ask questions and hopefully receive helpful advice from other researchers with some experience in whatever is causing the problems. For the last several years this has been hosted on Nature Network but as of, well right about now, we are shifting its platform to a Google Group.

We have always thought of Nature Protocols as more than a journal and we try to engage with our readers to help them in their research. We have done this through commenting on our manuscripts; this blog; our YouTube channel and the discussion forum. We are always on the look out for technologies that might be helpful.

That’s why we are now moving the Discussion Forum onto the Google Groups platform.  We hope that this will greatly improve the effectiveness of the discussions by making it even easier for anyone to become involved in the forum. It should be easier to access on mobile devices, and easier to post on as comments can be made and discussion topics started simply by sending an email to nature-protocols-discussion@googlegroups.com.There are other technical advantages for us as well, not least a better spam filtering system so hopefully far fewer topics or posts will be offering fake passports for sale!

There are two ways to access the new look discussion forum, either through the Discussion page on this blog or directly at Google Groups . We very much hope that this move will increase the usefulness of the Discussion Forum by making it easier for researchers to take part, easier for the topics to be found by people searching for answers using search engines, and easier for topics to be connected to from throughout the Web.

The Current Discussion Forum isn’t going away but will remain as an archive. However it will not be possible to post new topics or reply to existing threads. I have however copied across all discussions started this year into the new platform as well as some of the most active from 2012. If there are any threads that you would like to see continued please let me know and I will copy those across as well.

I hope that everyone will find the new forum at least as helpful as it’s predecessor.

So, what shall we talk about? As an eponymous fictional talk show psychiatrist didn’t quite say:

“We’re listening.”