For the past year or so, a team of Canadian scientists and science publishers (including yours truly) have been putting together Science Borealis, a home-grown Canadian science blogging initiative. Science Borealis is a aggregator for Canadian [1] science blogs: we syndicate RSS feeds for our members’ blogs, collating them in a single place to foster new connections and community. There are plenty of excellent Canadian science blogs out there, but to the best of our knowledge, there wasn’t any umbrella site listing or syndicating them, or trying to identify a broad community. So, we built one! Now there’s a central place to start looking for people of all stripes writing about Canadian science. We’re hoping to build some community ties between bloggers, and help foster and encourage new bloggers and writers to join the community. While the science communication community is rapidly expanding (especially in the US and the UK), the Canadian perspective can get lost in the shuffle, and we’re hoping to change that.

On a side note, in light of the spate of recent growing pains with regards to women’s representation/place/treatment in science and science communication, about two thirds of both the founders and the editors we’ve since added to the team are women. This is, of course, no panacea for ever making ill-thought comments or decisions, but we’re attuned to the discussions going on the community, and are committed to making our corner of the science communication world open, welcoming, and diverse. Starting off with a large number of women on the editorial team is, I think, a step in a positive direction.

So, please join us at Science Borealis! If you have a science blog, please syndicate it with us! If you’re interested in contributing or volunteering beyond syndicating your blog, or have any feedback for us, please let us know. We’re still looking for editors for both Math and Stats editor and General Science, so if you’re interested in joining the editorial team, please let us know.