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Front Matter

Front Matter
The Front Matter Blog covers the intersection of science and technology since 2007.
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Published

Authoring of scholarly articles is a recurring theme in this blog since it started in 2008. Authoring is still in desperate need for improvement, and nobody has convincingly figured out how to solve this problem. Authoring involves several steps, and it helps to think about them separately: Writing . Manuscript writing, including formatting, collaborative authoring Submission .

Published

Last Friday and Saturday the 6th SpotOn London conference tool place at the British Library. I had a great time with many interesting sessions and good conversations both in and between sessions. But I might be biased, since I helped organize the event, and in particular did help put the sessions for the Tools strand together.

Published

I think it is fair to say that commenting on scientific papers is broken. And with commenting I mean online comments that are publicly available, not informal discussions in journal clubs or at meetings. This definition would include discussions of papers on social media such as Twitter or Facebook. Why do I think that commenting is broken? the number of papers with online comments is low.

Published

Yesterday PLOS Biology published an essay by me: What Can Article Level Metrics Do for You? (Fenner, 2013). I had help from many others in writing the essay, in particular PLOS Biology editor Emma Ganley. I hope that the essay can help researchers get introduced to article-level metrics, and I am honored that the essay is part of the PLOS Biology 10th anniversary collection.

Published

Yesterday we created a set of roughly 10,000 DOIs for journal articles published in 2011 or 2012. We used these DOIs as a reference set in a data hackathon around article-level metrics/altmetrics - material for another blog post. The random DOis were generated using the CrossRef RanDOIm service, with article titles fetched from the CrossRef OpenURL API.

Published

According to the description on the Citation Style Language (CSL) website, CSL is an open XML-based language to describe the formatting of citations and bibliographies . We use reference managers such as Zotero , Mendeley , or Papers to format our references in manuscripts we submit for publication, and underneath a CSL processor such as Citeproc-js -