Big news in the science blogging world today! It’s complicated, so let me take you through it step by step, providing necessary background.

Since you are reading this here, I assume you are aware of the existence of Scientific American Blog Network. After a whole year, the network is doing great, bloggers have hit their stride, publishing fantastic posts every day. Traffic, social sharing and incoming links are gradually growing as well.

But you may not be aware that #SicAmBlogs is just one of the networks inside of our broader organization. Scientific American is a part of the Nature Publishing Group, which is a part of MacMillan Publishers. We also have media partners within the organization, who publish Scientific American in 14 languages other than English, e.g., Spektrum der Wissenschaft.

So it is not surprising that there are several other science blogging networks within the umbrella of the broader company. For example, Nature.com has a network of official and editorial blogs, each run by a different editor, but coordinated and managed as a whole by Lou Woodley.

Nature Education has its own network – Scitable blogs, managed by Khalil Cassimally.

Our European partners have blogging networks in German (since 2007), Dutch and Spanish languages, with some other languages being considered for the future.

The Nature Network is the first and oldest science blogging network in history. Yes, even before Science2.0 and Scienceblogs.com! And SciLogs has its own English language network.

Now, starting today, there is a change in this ecosystem.

Nature Network and English-language SciLogs have fused into a single network – check it out at SciLogs.com!

The past and archived blogs from Nature Network and SciLogs-En have been migrated to the new site, URL redirects should work, so there should be no issues with broken links to the old posts. This was also a technological upgrade, abandoning the outdated MT4 platform for the industry standard of today: WordPress.

The Community Manager of the new Scilogs.com network will be Khalil Cassimally. Yes, he will manage Scilogs.com and Scitable blogs and will continue co-blogging at The SA Incubator. In many ways, Khalil will be the glue that ties all the networks together in a closer cooperation in the future. Congratulations on the new position, Khalil!

To help the new network start on a high note, all the networks will participate, for the next week, in a blogswarm. To celebrate this addition to the NPG science blogging family, some of the NPG blogs are publishing posts focusing on “Beginnings”. Those may be personal beginnings (“how I published my first paper”), disciplinary beginnings (“how psychology started as a science”), or natural beginnings (“the origin of life”).

The best way to find all the posts in this series is to monitor the #BeginScights hashtag on Twitter, as well as the Of Schemes and Memes Blog which will link to all of them over the next week.

As far as #SciAmBlogs bloggers are concerned, you will see two posts per workday (one per weekend day) here in the “Beginnings” series. Today’s posts are already up – by Jason and Kalliopi – so check them out, and keep coming back for more.

You can also follow SciLogs.com on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus.