Science Craft has just celebrated its first birthday! We are delighted to mark the occasion with an appraisal of our first year and a preview of upcoming plans for 2013.

Science Craft’s birthday coincided with the start of the Chinese Year of the Snake so we are extremely excited to be offering our first international Scientific Writing workshop in China in March. The workshop will be held for Chinese students of the International Max Planck Research School for Computational Biology and Scientific Computing based in Shanghai. We are looking forward to working together with IMPRS-CBSC students to improve their writing skills so that China’s future research in the field of computational biology can reach a global audience.

The past year has seen us offer all four of our workshops (Scientific Writing, Proposal Writing, Data Analysis for Bench Biologists and Data Visualisation) to graduate students throughout Germany. Our focus has been on delivering a service that places the needs of graduate students first. So we are very encouraged at the response from our students in their feedback so far. Our workshops have received mean overall ratings of 9.3/10 (Scientific Writing), 8.8/10 (Proposal Writing), 9.0/10 (Data Analysis) and 9.0/10 (Data Visualisation). Participant feedback is essential in helping us improve our services. Only by listening to the suggestions of our students can we ensure that their training requirements are met.

Finally, we are very pleased to announce plans for the formal launch of Science Craft’s manuscript editing service in 2013. Editing of students’ writing samples has played an integral role in our Scientific Writing workshops. In the past year we have edited more than 100 writing samples and received an average rating of 9/10 for our editing from workshop participants.

Our manuscript editing service will offer the highest standards to scientists whose research deserves to make the greatest impact. So we are privileged to be joined in launching this new service by Dr Adam Wilkins who was managing editor of Bioessays for 24 years and is currently an editor for the journal Genetics. Adam has been a Berlin resident since 2011 and shares our enthusiasm not only for Berlin but also for the written communication of science. We are very fortunate that Adam will support Science Craft’s new editing service with such breadth and depth of expertise. To mark the occasion Adam has shared his thoughts on the importance of clear writing in a guest blog-post.