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While Faculty of 1000 is the go-to website for all life science and medicine researchers, we don’t really cater for high school or college students. This is the nature of the enterprise: our F1000 Members select research papers for their relevance to other working researchers, to keep abreast with what’s new or exciting (or both) in the field. Yes, we get occasional selections of papers that have general or historical interest, and it’s important for undergraduates to read the primary literature, but F1000 isn’t primarily a teaching tool.

However, what if somebody took primary research papers, and used the experiments described in them to create teaching materials suitable for high school or college students? That’s what Vikram Savkar, at Nature Education in Cambridge, Mass., has done with Scitable. Scitable is designed to be a set of materials and tools for teaching, currently concentrating on genetics and cell biology, but with plans to expand into other areas of life science.

It’s also free.

Savkar spent ten years at Pearson Higher Education, where he came to realize that the future would be digital space, and that education needed to move away from print. So when Nature Publishing Group decided to start an education division, Savkar says that Nature’s reputation made “a perfect match” with his own interests, and he launched Nature Education in January 2007. He recruited a team of scientists and editors, along with website and educational marketplace specialists, to put together a team “of people who don’t normally come together under one roof.”

It is intended to be much more than a simple online textbook. Scitable is “a new direction for Nature,” Savkar says. It consists of content specifically created for teachers and students in formal educational environments, that is at college and high school level. The material ranges from basic key introductory concepts to “dense and thorough investigations of key experimental milestones” in the history of each speciality. As well as texts, Scitable has online tools including “virtual classrooms” with private spaces for teaching faculty to have their own material and discussions with students, as well as “learning pads” for individuals. This combination of content and tools is “intended to be a new and forward-looking kind of educational experience,” he says.

The mission

Savkar’s main principle for Scitable is a desire to talk about science, “in a way not usually written or spoken about in educational material like textbooks.” Textbooks and courses normally focus on rote memorization of facts and theories. But, he says, “That’s not what we find compelling about science.” He wants to introduce students, at a very early stage, to the discovery process that engages practising scientists—which includes learning how to frame hypotheses, and appreciating what are the risks involved in testing those hypotheses, and the thrill—or despair!—that comes when subsequent experiments test a cherished theory. Science is a “living process conducted by human beings,” he says, and is anything but static. “That’s why science is worth doing.” Everything in Scitable is based on key experiments, drawing on Nature’s vast resource of papers. He says he’s keen to inspire the next generation of scientists: “Students who have a general interest in science start to love it and say this is what I want to be, this is what I want to do.”

The other key component of Scitable’s mission is about access. Savkar particularly wants the material and the tools to be used in developing countries where access to peer-reviewed literature is prohibitively expensive or difficult. This means that not only is Scitable free, but is also available by mobile phone. The very countries that don’t have subscriptions to journals also tend not to have good or reliable internet access or a plentiful supply of laptops—but they do have mobiles. He says that Scitable is currently used in over 165 countries right now, and he is concentrating on sub-Saharan Africa, because tropical diseases tend to be neglected, and there is a need for educational infrastructure before indigenous research and development centres are viable.

The content

All the content in Scitable is peer-reviewed. Editorial teams of scientists from appropriate fields work closely with editorial boards of teaching and research faculty to commission and write pieces. The articles go through a technical review process in which they’re checked and vetted by scientists and teachers before being published—testing not just for accuracy, but also whether the material will work in a classroom environment. All material is (currently) in English only: Savkar points our that English is the international language of science and students have to learn English to read most of the scientific literature. However, he hopes to be able to provide translations of key sections in the near future.

There is a continuous process of improvement based on feedback from teachers and scientists using the material. The users can tell Scitable about experiments that they think should have been included, and if the suggestions are approved (again by peer review) then the material on the site can be revised within a few days. Users are “fairly freely writing in and pointing out mistakes,” he says, but “much more often pointing out opportunities for improving the article.”

A major issue is knowing what material should be included. “Complete comprehensiveness is overwhelming for the student,” Savkar says, and there is an “agonizing process” as the teams try to decide what to keep in, and what to leave out. Then they have to decide how to refer to concepts that are left out, to avoid over-simplification—yet keep the articles readable and manageable. He says reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, and teachers are very pleased “we’re publishing a research-based discussion of the key concepts in science.”

Savkar is keen to fill what he thinks is an important gap between traditional txt-books (whether in print or online) and sources like Wikipedia. Wikipedia can be “quite good” he says, but it’s not comprehensive and not fully vetted, and not intended for classroom use. Teaching faculty “don’t trust Wikipedia as an educational tool,” he says, and they don’t want students using and citing it. He plans to make Scitable as easy to use as Wikipedia, but reliable and trusted, because it’s backed by Nature’s brand.

Savkar says that Scitable is part of Nature‘s big picture, “a way of connecting with the scientific community at a younger age” and helping students become scientists. Of course, he also hopes it will encourage these aspiring scientists to care about Nature as a journal—this and broadening the company’s scientific open can only be a canny move, given the challenges and obstacles facing scholarly publishing in the digital age.

You can register for a (free) Scitable account at the website, https://www.nature.com/scitable.

If you are a user already, or have been inspired to try it out, please feel free to leave your impressions in the comments here.