Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Sermo, the largest online physician community in the US, announced a partnership to facilitate the discussion and interpretation of content in leading NPG medical journals by US physicians.

In this collaboration, NPG will add "Discuss on Sermo" links to the online versions of articles in 12 of its leading medical journals, including Nature Medicine, Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine, and Leukemia. These links will allow US physicians reading the journals to create or join discussions of the articles in Sermo's physician-only knowledge-sharing community. On Sermo, discussions of research articles include both free-text comments and user-generated surveys, capturing the depth of individual observations and opinions as well as aggregating the collective wisdom of its 50,000 physician members.

To best facilitate information sharing, NPG will make the full text of all articles from a selection of its medical journals freely available to registered users of Sermo, which is itself freely available to all licensed US physicians. In return, Sermo will allow NPG to use the Sermo community to better inform and extend the relevance of its articles. The partnership is Sermo's first with a commercial publisher.

NPG's partnership with Sermo is consistent with its aims to use the Internet to improve research and communication, and its specific focus on improving medical research. "Clinical medicine is an important and growing area for Nature Publishing Group, as we continue to develop the Nature Clinical Practice series and our society-owned journal publishing program. At the same time, NPG is making efforts to bring its medical content to where the doctors are, and increasingly in the US, this is Sermo," said Steven Inchcoombe, Managing Director of NPG. "We are excited by the amount of valuable information generated in physician discussions on Sermo, and believe that bringing our medical research to physicians in this new medium will help speed the process of bringing new research advances to patient care."

"We are happy to kickoff this initiative with Nature Publishing Group, which continues to be a leader in adopting new technologies to augment its research publications,” said Alex Frost, Sermo VP for Research. "Sermo's core strength is bringing together physicians and aggregating their knowledge in a structured way. Although many have seen “user-generated” content as a threat to scholarly research and publishing, in partnering with NPG we’re realizing an important example of how user-generated content can augment and improve research and publishing."

The NPG titles that will make selected content freely available to Sermo users are: Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine, Nature Clinical Practice Endocrinology & Metabolism, Nature Clinical Practice Neurology, Nature Clinical Practice Urology, International Journal of Impotence Research, International Journal of Obesity, Journal of Human Hypertension, Journal of Perinatology, Leukemia, and Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases. 'Discuss on Sermo' links will be added to the online versions of selected articles in these journals, and also in Nature Medicine and Nature Reviews Cancer.

About Sermo
Launched in September 2006, Sermo is already the largest online physician community in the US, with nearly 50,000 physician members. On Sermo, physicians exchange knowledge with each other and gain potentially life saving insights directly from colleagues. Sermo harnesses the power of collective wisdom and enables physicians to discuss new clinical findings, report unusual events, and work together to improve patient care. Through its unique business model, Sermo is free to physicians and has no advertising or promotion. For more information, visit www.sermo.com.

About Nature Publishing Group
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd, dedicated to serving the academic, professional scientific and medical communities. NPG's flagship title, Nature, was first published in 1869. Other publications include Nature research journals, Nature Reviews, Nature Clinical Practice and a range of prestigious academic journals including society-owned publications. NPG also provides news content through Nature News and scientific career information through Naturejobs.

NPG is a global company with headquarters in London and offices in New York, San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston, Tokyo, Paris, Madrid, Munich, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Delhi, Mexico City and Basingstoke. For more information, please go to www.nature.com.