About Science Signaling

• From Science's STKE to Science Signaling
• What Is Signal Transduction?
• Science Signaling: Journal and Knowledge Environment
• History of KEs

From Science's STKE to Science Signaling

Science's signal transduction knowledge environment, a Web site and online journal devoted to the topic of cell signaling, launched in September 1999 under the name and journal title Science's STKE (ISSN: 1525-8882). For the first issue in January 2008, Science's STKE underwent a name change to Science Signaling (ISSN: 1937-9145). In addition to a new name, the citation also changed such that the first issue published in January as Science Signaling became volume 1, issue 1. The last issue published under the title Science's STKE was volume 2007, issue 417 on 18 December 2007. The changes in title and volume and issue numbering make the content and focus of the site more readily obvious to new readers and allow the journal to conform to a more conventional citation style that does not use the year of publication as the volume. Although the site and journal have a new name, the editors are happy to say that all of the distinctive features that STKE readers have come to expect will continue to be available and new features will continue to be developed to meet the needs of the signal transduction community.

More information about cataloging the journal, as well as details about the differences in the catalog records for Science's STKE and Science Signaling are available on the Fact Sheet.

What Is Signal Transduction?

Signal transduction refers to the biochemical processes by which cells respond to cues in their internal or external environment. Because signal transduction mechanisms are the natural control circuits that regulate biological systems, they provide potent targets for development of therapeutic agents to combat disease or otherwise alter the behavior of biological systems. Signal transduction research is an intensely active field of biomedical research and is of interest to a broad array of scientists. Science Signaling should be useful to scientists who specialize in signal transduction, as well as the many scientists who need to follow and apply the current findings of this field even though their primary interest may not be the signal transduction mechanisms themselves.

Science Signaling: Journal and Knowledge Environment

Science Signaling is a weekly journal, publishing 51 issues a year, as well as an online resource and information management tool that enables experts and novices in cell signaling to find, organize, and utilize information relevant to processes of cellular regulation. The overarching goal of Science Signaling is to identify and develop a mix of tools and approaches (algorithms, schemas, programs, and human organizational structures) that are stable, scalable, interoperable, and cost effective for providing access to information on cell signaling. All aspects of Science Signaling are designed to facilitate the site's main purpose, which is to maximize the efficiency with which the reader gathers, assimilates, and understands information about cell regulatory processes. We strive to increase the likelihood of the scientist making new connections between facts from discrete sources, and to support educational, collaborative, and community-building efforts. An additional goal of the site is to provide a database of cell signaling information with information supplied by scientific experts, as well as to develop the tools and organizational structures needed to undertake this project and present the results for both human readers and computer-based analysis.

Experienced editors from Science worked with software developers from HighWire Press to develop the knowledge environment, which includes information management tools that researchers indicated they needed. Science Signaling emphasizes information selected and vetted by authorities in the field, prudently supplemented with automated functions where appropriate. The high editorial standards that have been the benchmark for Science are applied to selection of material for Science Signaling.

More detailed information about the articles and resources of Science Signaling can be found in the corresponding Help sections. A brief description is provided below.

Science Signaling: Original Articles

Science Signaling is adding original Research Articles to the weekly journal. Science Signaling will publish research that represents a major advance in cell signaling, including key research papers in the rapidly expanding areas of signaling networks, systems biology, synthetic biology, computation and modeling of regulatory pathways, and drug discovery. Papers will be selected for publication in Science Signaling on the basis of their importance and broad interest to scientists engaged in the general area of cellular regulation as determined by the editors in consultation with a Board of Reviewing Editors and in-depth reviewers of papers. Acceptable papers should substantially refine current understanding of important signaling processes with priority given to those papers that the reviewers and editors determine to provide new concepts and new understanding of biological signal transduction and that are likely to find application multiple biological systems or in a diverse range of investigations.

Science Signaling publishes original Perspectives, Reviews, and Protocols, most of which are solicited by the editors. Perspectives present the opinion of the author focused on one main issue, often a new development from a published paper or group of papers. Meeting Reports and Book Reviews also appear in the Perspectives section. Reviews are more complete analyses of topics of broad interest and are critically peer reviewed for scholarship, clarity, and accuracy. Protocols are presented in detail with background information for interested readers who may not intend to actually use the protocol and with detailed instructions and troubleshooting guides for readers who do wish to apply the technique.

Science Signaling: Resources for Education

The Teaching Resources, Glossary, and Journal Club sections of Science Signaling provide information, materials, and articles that enable students and educators to better understand and teach the complex topic of cell signaling. The Teaching Resources include diverse materials that aid in teaching topics or courses in cell signaling, such as lecture notes and slides, syllabi, research projects, experiments, animations, discussions, and online tutorials. These resources are intended to facilitate in the instruction of complicated biological mechanisms and theories, as well as to encourage active student discussion and participation. The Glossary provides definitions for acronyms, abbreviations, and other cell signaling terms commonly found in Science Signaling articles and resources. The definitions are provided by the editors based on the usage of the terms in Science Signaling articles; when available, terms have links to more detailed information in the Database of Cell Signaling. Journal Club articles are brief pieces that highlight recent exciting developments in cell signaling research and are written by graduate students or postdoctoral fellows with little or no input from a senior author. These articles allow the new generation of signaling researchers to gain experience in critical analysis of the recent literature and in the process of scientific communication, while providing the readers a fresh view of cell signaling research.

Science Signaling: The Virtual Journal

Nineteen publishers have agreed to include full-text access to signal transduction articles from their journals in the Science Signaling Virtual Journal. Daily, semantic indexing software analyzes the contents of the latest issues of participating journals, identifies the signal transduction-related articles, and adds these to the Virtual Journal. The automatic indexing process is supplemented by editorial oversight to add articles missed by the algorithm or to remove articles that are not relevant to the field of cell signaling.

Science Signaling: Current Awareness and Personalization

My Science Signaling provides customization features to tailor the site to the user's needs and interests (these features require personal subscription or registration and access through an institutional site license). Science Signaling offers eTOC alerts (alerting users when a new issue of Science Signaling is published), as well as three types of CiteTrack research alerts: (i) keyword alerts, alerting users when new original Science Signaling articles or articles in the Virtual Journal are published, or resources in the Community and Resources sections of the site are added that contain the specified keywords; (ii) author alerts, alerting users when articles by the specified authors are added to Science Signaling; and (iii) citation alerts, alerting users when a specified article is referenced by another article published in a journal hosted by HighWire Press.

In addition to these user-specified current awareness tools, each week the editors of Science Signaling scan the literature for newly published papers of particularly broad interest. Brief summaries of the selected papers are presented in Editors' Choice.

Users can organize information found at the site into Folders. My Display Settings provide personalized filters for searches that allow individual users to view only material that is new since their last visit to the site or limit search results to only those journals they have selected from the Virtual Journal. My Saved Searches allows users to save personalized searches to execute on demand without requiring the parameters to be re-entered each time.

Science Signaling: The Database of Cell Signaling

The Database of Cell Signaling contains information on signaling components and their relations. The data are organized into signaling pathways called Connections Maps and are provided by leading authorities in the field. The database organizes information and provides previously unavailable information, such as short lists of selected key references and the authorities' evaluations of the strength of existing evidence for relations in the database. The Connections Maps themselves are dynamically generated pathway diagrams that instantly reflect new information provided by the authorities.

Science Signaling: A Community

The electronic format of Science Signaling allows users to interact more easily with authors, researchers, experts, and colleagues. Forums provide users the opportunity to exchange views and information in topically organized threaded discussions. E-Letters allow readers to add their opinion to, point out new research about, or address the author of any specific original article in Science Signaling. Interactions among the cell signaling community are facilitated by the Directory, which includes contact information and descriptions about the interests of researchers, students, and others interested in cell signaling.

Science Signaling: A Portal to Online Resources

Science Signaling provides access to various online resources, including a search interface for Science Careers; an Events calendar of meetings, conferences, and workshops of interest to the signal transduction community; and ST NetWatch, which includes editorially reviewed descriptions and links to useful Web sites and online tools relevant to signaling research and education.

History of KEs

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) established a collaboration with Stanford University Libraries (SUL) and The Center for Resource Economics/Island Press (Island Press) in 1996 to help scientific researchers and nonprofit organizations harness the power of the Internet and electronic publishing. At that time, only a handful of journals were available through the Internet, and the World Wide Web was in its infancy. It was clear, however, that the Web could transform the ways in which scientists gathered and shared information as part of research efforts. We recognized that Web-based technologies could enhance access to databased information and greatly improve the effectiveness of information transfer and the creation of new knowledge. Development work on the project began in early 1998 after the collaborative received a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts to create a prototype of the Web-based electronic networking tools we envisioned.

Knowledge Environment (KE) is the term coined by the collaborative to describe the collection of electronic networking tools we are developing. KEs use practical, production-quality tools to systematize the consensus knowledge within a scientific domain and to facilitate users' access to that knowledge. In a KE, access occurs through searching, browsing, and current awareness features combined with user-friendly graphical interfaces. KEs combine primary and review literature with more dispersed sources of "how-to," "what-is," and "where-to" knowledge. Specific electronic tools that facilitate entry of information into the underlying databases continue to be developed as part of the concept.

Signal transduction research was selected for the prototype KE for several reasons.

• The characteristics of the potential user base allow us to test many of the electronic tools that are central to the KE concept.
• The user population is an interdisciplinary group, so we are able to test those KE tools that are specifically designed to facilitate communication across disciplines and to filter information such that only material relevant to the user's interest is presented.
• The topic can be mapped by classes of data structures, which allows us to test the use of a graphical interface to access and display data from a database maintained by experts.
• No single journal serves as the main source of signal transduction information; researchers must scan numerous sources to stay abreast of current advances. Thus, there is a clear need for information management tools.
• The informal exchange of information within this research community is also fractured because signal transduction researchers do not all belong to one scholarly society.

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