SciBX

SciBX, a new publishing venture between Nature Publishing Group and Biocentury, is a weekly publication that aims to deliver information to biopharma executives and investors to help them identify commercially relevant science. The content is determined entirely by what is published in the journals that SciBX covers, which means that there are no “coming next week” magazine-style teasers.

However, it also means that subscribers can be sure of reading a publication with all the padding stripped out. What is left is purely driven by science that affects the issues facing biopharma companies and their investors.

Each issue, consisting of about 20 pages, promises to pack a timely punch of comprehensive and understandable science and technology analysis from the scientific and business perspective. A dedicated editorial team hopes to achieve this by filtering the thousands of scientific papers that are published each week and selecting from this pool the most commercially and scientifically important, high-impact peer-reviewed ones.

These target papers will come from the most frequently cited journals in the biotech, life science and chemistry fields and form the basis for articles which can be best thought of as coming in two distinct flavours: analysis and key briefing.

Keen analysis
The analysis articles form the backbone of SciBX, providing an in-depth analysis of the key research findings in a given scientific and commercial landscape. Fully illustrated with high-quality graphics and tables, they manage to bring to the page a critical understanding of the scientific context, commercial impact and critical next steps of scientific research.

I like the way these articles empower the reader by giving them full explanations of the most significant scientific advances while always ensuring that they are placed within the correct scientific and commercial context. Thanks to a basic set of four subheadings to categorise all articles (drug platforms, markers, targets and mechanisms, tools) the reader is always able to pinpoint those of primary interest.

The key briefings, collectively referred to by SciBX as the Distillery, provide the reader with concise at-a-glance references that notify and classify only the most important research papers.

The categorisation is less broad than in the articles section, relying upon just two labels: This Week in Therapeutics (covering research on targets and compounds grouped by disease class and indication) and This Week in Techniques (covering findings relevant to research tools, disease models and manufacturing processes with the potential to enable or improve drug discovery and development). However, all content is backed by an impressively comprehensive two-page index and the integrated search functionality of PDF reader software.

Essential findings
Each week you end up with only the most essential scientific findings, distilled from a weekly review by the SciBX editorial team of 400 papers in 37 high-impact journals. It provides readers with an instant overview of the impact of the latest life science research by going beyond the abstracts and exploring everything from licensing status to companies working in the field.

SciBX sums up the underlying philosophy as “understanding the scientific and business context is the key to lowering risk”.

Everyone from the pharmaceutical and biotech industries right through to the financial community is being driven to make strategic upstream decisions that rely upon translational science: high-risk, early work that creates commercial value from scientific discovery. The risks are increased by the fact that research is fast-paced and diverse, and that it is undertaken in a rapidly changing commercial landscape.

The first issue of SciBX was published on 31 January, and a weekly edition will appear every Thursday by email as a PDF file. Subscriptions are being sold on a per-seat model with academic and government institution seat pricing starting at $2,395 (£1,220). Corporate customers need to cough up a little more at $2,995 (£1,525) per seat, with both getting additional seats via a tiered model. You can download a free trial issue at www.scibx.com.

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