Introducing ourselves

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Digital Science — a new business division of Macmillan Publishers and younger sibling of Nature Publishing Group. You can read more about our approach and product offerings in our about page or on our products page. In this post we wanted to take a closer look at a couple of other key questions: why are we creating this new business, and what is our ultimate goal?

Digital technologies are transforming all areas of our lives — commerce, education, the arts — and science, too, is changing. The web has already revolutionised the way we produce, publish and disseminate scientific knowledge. It also provides fundamental new opportunities for processing, annotating, curating, querying and sharing information, as well as organising our laboratories and the research process itself.

But we’re still much nearer the beginning of this journey than the end. For all the recent progress, we’re not even close to fully realising the potential of information technology to accelerate the discovery and and application of scientific insights. At Digital Science, we aim to to contribute to these important developments by providing tools and services that will make researchers more productive through state-of-the-art software.

In that sense we’re very different to the content-based businesses normally associated with a publishing company like Macmillan. But we will also be working closely with scientific publishers — not least our colleagues at Nature Publishing Group — to make the most of their scientific expertise and carefully curated content, because only by combining expert human judgement with the best technology can we hope to have the impact that we seek.

To fulfil our mission, we’re bringing together a team with a wide range of experiences, from software development to business development, and pharma to open science, to research.

We’ll be posting regular updates here as we work towards these goal. I hope you’ll stay tuned.