"Nature" devotes journal’s largest supplement ever on a bioregion to Catalonia
<p>The special supplement to the issue published on 24 November analyses the factors that have allowed research in the BioRegion to persevere in spite of the financial crisis</p>
The journal Nature, a global multidisciplinary leader in the scientific arena, has included a special supplement on Catalonia and its companies and research centers with its 24 November issue. Entitled “Spotlight on Catalonia”, the prestigious publication has devoted a total of 20 pages to the BioRegion of Catalonia and its stakeholders.
Nature decides freely which region to feature in the “Spotlight on….” section, which is a periodical publication that has chosen Catalonia this time. Past issues have focused on regions and countries including Spain, Singapore, the Netherlands, Wallonia, New York, Kobe, and more (see the full list here).
The supplement focusing on Catalonia in this issue is the largest the journal has ever devoted to a bioregion and the third largest ever published by the journal, behind only two special supplements focusing on Germany as a whole. It is the second time the supplement has turned its attention to Catalonia, after the first special on the BioRegion was published in 2011. “Biocat has worked with ‘Nature’ to disseminate this initiative that helps position the BioRegion of Catalonia as an international benchmark,” highlights Biocat CEO Albert Barberà.
The special includes 3 pages of editorial contents produced by the journal, entitled 'Spotlight on Catalonia: Staying a steady course through the storm', analyzing the factors that have allowed the BioRegion of Catalonia to weather the financial crisis that has “hit Spain hard” and keep research “in surprisingly good shape”. The article highlights, for example, that Catalonia obtained 180 research grants from the European Research Council (ERC) between 2007 and 2015, more than the rest of Spain combined.
The article also highlights the role of the Catalan Institute of Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), created by the Catalan Government in 2001 to attract researchers with internationally competitive salaries, a policy that Nature authors say has worked in key areas like genomics, photonics and supercomputing, putting buffers in place in the BioRegion before the storm arrived.
The rest of the supplement includes payed interviews and ads featuring stakeholders in the BioRegion, including hospitals like Hospital Clínic Barcelona and Centre Mèdic Teknon; companies like Solti and Almirall; universities such as the UOC, University of Barcelona, University of Lleida and Rovira i Virgili University; organizations like Biocat, CERCA Institution, EIT Health, “la Caixa” Foundation, Fundació Cemcat and Barcelona Respiratory Network; and research bodies like the IRTA, ALBA Synchrotron, BIST, VHIO, IBEC and CRAG, among many others.
The “Spotlight on Catalonia” special will be seen by the journal’s more than 365,000 hardcopy readers and 270,000 unique online viewers that regularly seek employment through their online version. Named the Journal of the Century and ranked number 1 among multidisciplinary science journals, Nature is considered the favorite informational media outlet of the science industry, having published 275 Nobel laureates and discoveries like the Human Genome Project, Dolly the cloned sheep and the discovery of DNA structure.