In a post last week I talked about roads and stagecoaches, and how work on scholarly infrastructure can often be more important than building customer-facing apps. One important aspect of that infrastructure work is to not duplicate efforts. A good example is information (or metadata) about scholarly publications. I am the technical lead for the open source article-level metrics (ALM) software.
I attended the Open Knowledge Festival this week and I had a blast. For three days (I also attended the fringe event csv,conf on Tuesday) I listed to wonderful presentations and was involved in great discussions - both within sessions, but more importantly all the informal discussions between and after sessions.
Literate programming is a methodology that combines a programming language with a documentation language, thereby making programs more robust, more portable, more easily maintained, and arguably more fun to write than programs that are written only in a high-level language. The main idea is to treat a program as a piece of literature, addressed to human beings rather than to a computer.
Earlier this week Björn Brembs wrote in a blog post (What Is The Difference Between Text, Data And Code?): The post is about the importance of publication of data and software where currently the rewards are stacked disproportionately in favor of text publications . The intended audience is probably mainly other scientists (Björn is a neurobiologist) who are reluctant to publish data and/or code, but there is another interesting aspect
Last week I had a little discussion on Twitter about a great blog post by Zach Holman: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This. The post is not only fun to read, but also reminded me that it is now almost 20 years (1995) that I built my first website - of course using some of the techniques (the one pixel gif!, the tag!) described in the post.
In this post I want to talk about some of the misunderstandings I frequently encounter when discussing markdown as a format for authoring scholarly documents. Scholars will always use Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is of course what almost all authors use in the life sciences and many other disciplines. One big reason for this is the file formats accepted my manuscript submission systems.
The Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) is a NISO standard that defines a set of XML elements and attributes for tagging journal articles. JATS is not only used for fulltext content at PubMed Central (and JATS has evolved from the NLM Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite originally developed for PubMed Central), but is also increasinly used by publishers.
In October I published an essay on Article-Level Metrics (ALM) in PLOS Biology (Fenner, 2013). The essay is a good introduction into Article-Level Metrics, and I am proud that it is part of the Tenth Anniversary PLOS Biology Collection. Like all PLOS content, the article was published with a Creative Commons attribution license, allowing me to republish the article on this blog. I have now done so and the article is available here.
Article-level metrics (ALMs) provide a wide range of metrics about the uptake of an individual journal article by the scientific community after publication. They include citations, usage statistics, discussions in online comments and social media, social bookmarking, and recommendations.
Opening Science: The Evolving Guide on How the Internet is Changing Research, Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing is a SpringerOpen book (using a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license) that will be published in a few weeks. If you can’t wait for the book to be published and/or you want to make comments or suggestions, go to the dynamic book online version at http://book.openingscience.org.
