ScienceOnline2011, the fifth annual international meeting on Science and the Web, is only two days away. I am very excited for many reasons, most importantly because it gives me the chance to meet many online friends in person – again or for the first time. On Saturday I will help moderate two (related) sessions: How is the Web changing the way we identify scientific impact and Having fun with citations.
It’s very unusual for me to post two blog posts in a single day, and even more so when both posts are based on press releases by the same organization. But this is important news for everybody interested in scholarly publishing.
Articles published in Nature , Nature Biotechnology , Nature Cell Biology , Nature Medicine or Nature Chemical Biology are now available for renting from DeepDyve. Downloading or printing is not possible, and the $3.99 rental is for 24 hours. Later this month, Nature plans to release the nature.com reader for the iPad.
In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee and others started HTML and the world wide web to facilitate scientific communications at CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. Although the world wide web profoundly changed scholarly publishing (and of course many other things), HTML did not become the standard document format for scientific papers. In fact, there is no standard document format.
Today I posted the pre-print of a paper titled Author Identifier Overview that I submitted to the journal Libreas. This is the abstract: Unique identifiers for scholarly authors are still not commonly used, but provide a number of benefits to authors, institutions, publishers, funding organizations and scholarly societies. This report gives an overview about some of the popular author identifier systems, and their characteristics.
One of the more complicated aspects of scientific writing is reference management – an important limitation of online collaborative tools such as Google Docs. I have argued before that WordPress has the potential to become a great scientific writing tool. Wordpress can’t do reference management out of the box, and the available plugins are somewhat limited.
Jason Rollins gave a presentation with that topic at the recent STM Innovations Seminar in London. The video of his presentation has now been made available by River Valley TV, and his slides are here. Jason talks about some recent trends in reference management software. For him one important new trend is APIs/extensions. I fully agree with him, but we haven’t really seen many tools based on these APIs.
Last week the first public beta (version 0.5) of Paperpile was released (available for Mac and Linux). Paperpile is a desktop reference manager with typical features: search in PubMed, Google Scholar or ArXiv, import PDF files, support for BibTex and other standard file formates, etc. Paperpile currently doesn’t sync with a web-based version, and Paperpile doesn’t insert citations into manuscripts.
Two weeks ago Eva Amsen wrote in a thoughtful blog post: Eva argues that – contrary to popular belief – there is actually a divide between science and technology. Scientists are on average not really comfortable using technology, and many computing tools aimed for scientists really miss the point of what scientists really care about.
Last Friday the latest science blogging network officially launched: Occam’s Typewriter. The independent blogging network started out with eight bloggers and one guest blog, all of them well characterized by Bob O’Hara. Most of the bloggers have moved their blogs from Nature Network, where I wrote next to them from 2007 until September this year.
Citations are a fundamental concept of scholarly works. Unfortunately they are also difficult to do. Traditional writing tools such as Microsoft Word can’t really handle them in a way that is appropriate for a scientific manuscript, and that is why we have reference managers such as Endnote, Zotero or Mendeley.