This year’s SpotOn London conference takes place November 14-15 and the registration has opened this Monday. I am helping organize this conference since 2009, and I again look forward to the sessions, and - more importantly - the discussions with people in and between sessions this year.

In my last post I wrote about the importance of keeping things simple in scholarly publishing, today I want to go into more detail with one example: citations in scholarly documents. Citations are an essential part of scholarly documents, and they are summarized in the references section at the end of the article or book chapter. The problem is that not everything that is cited in a scholarly document ends up in the references list.

Doing scientific research is becoming increasingly complex, both in terms of the tools and technologies used, and in the collaboration across disciplines and locations that is increasingly commonplace. While the way we write up and publish research is of course also very different from 25 years ago, I would argue that our tools and services haven’t quite evolved at the same pace.

One of the important outcomes of the Markdown for Science workshop that took place in June 2013 was a decision on a name - Scholarly Markdown - and a brief definition: Markdown that supports the requirements of scientific texts Markdown as format that glues open scientific text resources together A reference implementation with documentation and tests A community In my eyes this is still a great definition.

One of the major challenges of writing a journal article is to keep track of versions - both the different versions you create as the document progresses, and to merge in the changes made by your collaborators. For most academics Microsoft Word is the default writing tool, and it is both very good and very bad in this.

In July and August I attended the Open Knowledge Festival and Wikimania. At both events I had many interesting discussions around open source tools for open access scholarly publishing, and I was part of a panel on that topic at Wikimania last Sunday.

One topic I will cover this Sunday in a presentation on Open Scholarship Tools at Wikimania 2014 together with Ian Mulvany is visualization. Data visualization is all about telling stories with data , something that is of course not only important for scholarly content, but for example increasingly common in journalism. This is a big and complex topic, but I hope the following will get you started.

This Sunday Ian Mulvany and I will do a presentation on Open Scholarship Tools at Wikimania 2014 in London. From the abstract: One of the four broad topics we have picked are digital object identifiers (DOI)s . We want to introduce them to people new to them, and we want to show some tricks and cool things to people who already now them. Along the way we will also try to debunk some myths about DOIs.

Before all our content turned digital, we already used page numbers to describe a specific section of a book or longer document, with older manuscripts using the folio before that. Page numbers have transitioned to electronic books with readers such as the Kindle supporting them eventually.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. Yesterday 60 years ago the first volume of the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien was published.