Nature really gone bad! I'm pissed off. Instead of acquiring tons of small useless journals they should realize the real thing - online community and its impact. It was under-under-underestimated. - Alexey

It would be very interesting to find out what criteria were used by the NPG to evaluate "Nature Reports Stem Cells" and "the Niche". Not enough visitors? If so, how many visitors would be enough? - Jim Till

You can make a comment at The Niche blog if you have any questions for the editors. (Go to link above). - Maxine

I did make a comment at "the Niche". The comment has been posted, but, so far, no response. - Jim Till

Monya Baker and Natalie DeWitt commented, in their final post to "the Niche", that they "are sad". So, I suspect that the decision was a business one. Other blogs will need to fill the gap left by the closing down of this high-quality contribution to the stem cell field. - Jim Till

Here is a link to another frindfeed thread about this (http://ff.im/ajDua). As I mentioned there I think this was an interesting experiment in online community building. It had the things I though were important to stimulate user participation but users were not really participating. I wish they had a bit more detailed explanation about this closing down. Particularly about the numbers of users reading/participating on the site over time. - Pedro Beltrao

commenting section under the final Niche post is updated http://blogs.nature.com/reports... @Jim - I'm sure that decision was a business one. I suspect based on budget NPG decide to cut off something. Of course it was freely available online resource - it doesn't make money. @Pedro it was great experiment which actually reach the endpoint - building community with valid information source and discussions. Sadly NPG didn't ask community, didn't ask about feedback (that usually Nature-based online projects like to do). They just did it. How do you judge participation of users? How NPG judged? By number of comments? By number of RSS-readers? Number of views per day? Everybody know (NPG knew it also) how scientific community accept all of "online-discussions" things. In this case they just should ask readers about significance of the project and we will reply. They just destroy it instead. - Alexey

for a sec I was thinking about the option that a community (like us) could continue&maintain NRSC & the Niche in a freely rebranded way...here's a post I made for the Niche back in 2007 http://blogs.nature.com/reports... - Attila Csordas

It was great Attila! Other "members of community" also participated in making of Niche - http://blogs.nature.com/reports... or NRSC - http://www.nature.com/stemcel... Professors and freelancers wrote for NRSC, but not only NPG journalists. So it was made by community and for community finally. - Alexey

I wrote the necrology - http://hematopoiesis.info/2009... - Alexey

HI Everyone, It would be really amazing to see the community pick this up. You might be able to do this through Nature Network. I can make some introductions for you if there's interest. (Though I think you likely know the relevant players already). Thanks so much for your enthusiasm. Monya - Monya Baker

If one searches, using the key words "stem cell", for all of the Forums currently using Nature Network, 13 Forums match these key words. None of these Forums appears to be very active. See: http://network.nature.com/forums... For example, the "cancer stem cells (CSC) forum" currently has 25 members (one of whom is Alexey), but 0 topics and 0 replies: http://network.nature.com/groups... - Jim Till

Jim, I gave up discussions on NN about 2 years ago, because it was zero interest to the topic and all discussions were dead. I don't know maybe something changed now, but i'm doubt about it. I think NRSC+Niche was the best model for unite community and discuss online. Even so, Niche commenting was not as active as me and editors wanted. - Alexey

I too am sad the shut down The Niche. This just shows the downsides to letting business interests host the discussions. It would cost me absolutely nothing to host a blog and stem cell news discussion forum at my web host, and I could leave it running indefinitely because I don't need to answer to anyone in terms of return on investment. If the community were to run it, we'd be more free to innovate and try new things, getting away from Nature's static and (to me) somewhat unsightly look-and-feel. - Mr. Gunn

@Mr Gunn sounds like a plan! ;) To be fair it does take a lot of work over and above the initial setup (and cheap webhosting) to get a contributing community going and somebody has to bear the time / money cost, right? There are lots of examples of sites started by people in their spare time and guiding it into something successful and sustainable - and an equal number where the tumbleweed has taken over. - Euan

And just so that people don't think Euan is being a homer, I was about the write much the same. - Deepak Singh