How often have you come across a great story about climate change, sustainable energy or biodiversity, and wished you could share it with others who care deeply about the subject? This week, in preparation for Earth Day, you have your chance: Scientific American is partnering with NewsTrust, a not-for-profit Web site designed to "help people find good journalism online" by encouraging its readers to submit and review articles from across the Web.
We'd like to invite you to participate in this partnership by signing up for NewsTrust and submitting articles that relate to the environment. Everything from basic research findings to policy and lifestyle coverage is fair game.
Here's how it works: Once you sign up, the fastest way to get started is to go to the NewsTrust Environment section and click on the "For Review" tab. Under this tab you'll find stories submitted by other NewsTrust users in the Environment category that need reviews before they can appear on the NewsTrust home page or in the window that will appear on all environment stories on SciAm.com this week.
Clicking on the "review it" link next to an article opens that item as well as a new window that includes NewsTrust's ranking tool. You can do anything from giving an article a single overall ranking to evaluating it according to up to a dozen different criteria, simply by clicking on the number of stars (out of a possible five) that you want to give it.
Once you're comfortable with reviewing stories, you might also want to try submitting your own articles to NewsTrust via their Web site or, for users who are comfortable with it, through a handy bookmarklet.
Articles that our readers, participating editors and the other members of the NewsTrust community highlight in the Environment category will in turn appear in the NewsTrust window that appears on this page, as well as on every related article that we post this week.
For those of you who are passionate about this topic, this is your chance to place your favorite recent coverage in front of thousands of other like-minded readers, and to discover a few new topics (or even sources) along the way. The hope, of course, is to stimulate even more high-quality coverage. Join us.