17th January, 2006, The Daily Telegraph

New and unexpected stories, at the click of a button, writes Prof Steve Jones

A publisher once asked me if I might be interested in writing a novel. I understood at once the literal meaning of the phrase "My mind went blank". What, asked my inner genie, would your work of fiction be about? Answer came there none; and the Booker Prize remains forever out of reach.

Science journalists, both those in the business and those about to enter the latest round of The Daily Telegraph and Bayer Science Writer Awards, face the opposite problem. They have an infinite supply of subjects, renewed every day. What topic, from that torrent of information, should their piece be about?

A glance at this week's newspapers and popular science magazines shows just how wide a range there is: global warming killing off frogs, new methods for generating stem cells, plants that make methane, and what space dust might tell us about the origin of the Universe.

Those stories are interesting, varied and up-to-date; but they all share a hidden thread that links - or entangles - everyone who writes about science, for each of them first appeared in Nature.

A quick look at several recent French, German and American newspapers and magazines shows all four tales prominently displayed, often in almost the same terms - and, no doubt, many of the entrants in this year's competition will use those items or their equivalents as they pour from the presses of that noble publication over the next few weeks.

Nobody denies that Nature is a great journal, but why limit yourself to a single source? No writer on politics, or finance, or sport would dream of that: their job is to discover stories that nobody else has found. Unfortunately, Nature has an excellent (and highly addictive) website, which every journalist, and every scientist, reads every week (and plenty of them shell out the annual £130 needed for the full journal).

Cynics - a class that includes nearly all scientists - even claim that the editor selects papers just because they are eye-catching (this week's issue has a piece about ants teaching each other to find food: the French media liked it, but the Brits were less impressed).

The problem with digging out less-publicised stories about science is the inaccessibility of the basic information. Most technical publications are expensive and, without a university library, hard to find. Now things have changed.

The Web is opening up lots of once hidden gateways into the labyrinth of science, many of which do not charge an entrance fee. Google, of course, gives a veneer of expertise on any topic at the click of a button: but it is also the key to some deeper sources. Type in the four letters PLOS - the Public Library of Science - and you reach a site that makes the latest research freely available to all.

This month's issue has a piece on the rapid evolution of a gene in men compared with chimps that renders us susceptible to mind-altering drugs, as a hint that brain activity is what makes us human (a refreshing contrast to other new work hinting that the contents of the scrotum evolve more rapidly than those of the skull) and another on the dangers of minute amounts of lead or chlorine in the environment.

Other organisations are almost as generous. Stanford University's online HighWire Press has a million free articles available, with access to almost a hundred current publications (there must be something for the hopeful author in the Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, or Textile Research).

PubMed Central does the same for the latest news in medicine, while that American heavyweight the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (universally referred to as PNAS) also puts out free electronic versions of some of its own papers.

They include, in the past few weeks, one showing that a protein involved in Alzheimer's diseases has an effect on pain sensitivity and another on the how to build a bacterium.

The "Google Scholar" search engine has opened up another great gap in the financial wall around new scientific information. Plenty of researchers now put their papers online as soon as they appear in print, allowing the nosy to read the results without stumping up the journal's entrance ticket. Type in a topic you want to chase and you may find yourself in all kinds of unexpected (and once exclusive) places.

And, if all that fails, this week's Nature has "A magnetic reconnection X-line extending more than 390 Earth radii in the solar wind", "A Cretaceous symmetrodont therian with some monotreme-like postcranial features" and "Outbred embryos rescue inbred half-siblings in mixed-paternity broods of live-bearing females" (and the last paper tells a genuinely weird tale). Go on: as an aspiring science writer, remember the unbearable aboutness of being, and give one of them a try!

Steve Jones is professor of genetics of University College London