I'm currently in Chicago at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). This is a large meeting on clinical cancer research with about 30.000 people attending. Rather than writing about the specific research presented and discussed at the meeting, I would like to talk about how (web) technology can help in having a better conference.
Earlier this week Matt Brown announced important changes to the Nature Network software: The first step towards new local hubs. Most importantly, it is now possible to set your location and hub. The hub can be the same as the location, or a city or region nearby (as in my case Berlin). Later this year, Nature Network will add new hubs to the existing London and Boston.
Microsoft yesterday announced on the Live Search Blog that their Academic Search will be closed next week. And Google Scholar still has shortcomings, including the lack of special limitation features that are found in PubMed. A more detailed comparison of PubMed and Google Scholar can be found in this paper.
In one of my first blog posts (before I joined Nature Network) about a year ago I wrote about the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 2007 Meeting. I was surprised that only a handful of blogs reported about the event, one of the largest and most important meetings for clinical cancer research. One would think that blogging and scientific meetings would be a natural combination.
In the last issue of Nature, a news feature and research highlight look at two recent high-profile paper retractions. The two papers by biochemist Homme Hellinga delt with rational enzyme design. A second group couldn't reproduce the results, ultimately leading to the paper retractions. Then a third group was able to demonstrate that rational enzyme design is indeed possible.
The success or failure of Web 2.0 efforts for scientists depends to a large extend on the availability of cool applications that make the everyday life of a scientist easier. Many of these applications of course already exist, but I would argue that there is a lot of room for improvement.
Google Publish or Perish is a new science writing tool that facilitates paper submissions. The tool was field-tested at the NIH and should be particularly valuable for open access and public access journals. Accepted papers are automatically added to your Researcher ID account. For more information, read this forum post by Matt Brown.
Last week I received email invitations from three different journals to submit a research article. I should have felt flattered, but it is unclear why it is me that received invitations to the journals Biomarker Insights , Genomics Insights and International Journal of Medical Sciences . All three journals already exist for a few years, and I wouldn't say that the focus of my research is biomarkers or genomics.
Our recent discussion on public access made me have a closer look on the options I have for my own papers. The results aren't pretty.Most journals allow posting post-prints on a university website The copyright agreement with the journal is the easy part. Most publishers allow posting of post-prints (after peer-review, but not the journal PDF) in a non-commercial repository, usually the repository of your institution.
A real Web 2.0 application needs a serious mashup (web_application_hybrid). At least the folks at ResearcherID thought so. You might remember that ResearcherID creates a unique author ID for each interested scientist and was launched by Thomson Scientific (recently renamed Thomson Reuters) earlier this year. The new ResearcherID features include a mashup with Yahoo Maps that shows the location of your collaborators.
