Nature Publishing Group Launches Scitable for Undergraduate Genetics

Nature publishing group has launched Scitable, an online "collaborative learning space" targeted at undergraduate students and teachers interested in genetics. This is the latest in a series of social information tools that Nature has launched. Past offerings include Connotea (collaborative reference management), Nature Networks (science social network), and their Open Text Mining Initative (scholarly content common data exchange standards).

Scitable is extremely feature rich and supports both synchronous (messaging) and asynchronous (questions, discussions) communications. Here are some key elements:

• The core data model seems to have Documents; Topics>Sub-Topics; People; Groups; Discussions; and Questions. They also have something called a 'Learning Path' which I can't really understand. That data model and architecture will enable Scitable to scale to other areas such as Biology. In this first instance Topic=Genetics and SubTopics={Evolutionary Genetics; Gene Expression & Regulation; Chromosomes & Cytogenetics; ...}.
  
• Each SubTopic has an editor. There are 9 Sub-Topics currently. There is some editorial overlap in the Sub-Topics. The Genetics Topic doesn't seem to have an editorial board that I could find.
  
• Over 150 undergraduate level articles explaining key concepts in Genetics. This content has been bundled by Nature (more editorial work there) into packets that professors can add to classroom groups.

What Nature is doing with Scitable is expand the notion of "publishing" to include the creation of environments that support understanding through user content creation. They're also offering core infrastructure to support collaboration amongst the genetics research and teaching community.

Update I: Here's the Press release from Nature Education. Also here's a quote from Nature Education Head Vikram Savkar:

“Research supports the fact that while science students are still using textbooks and library resources for their science classes, they are now depending increasingly on the internet. However, reliability of information is a concern. Our goal is to provide an authoritative and compelling science resource on the internet for students and faculty anywhere in the world.”