Very VERY occasionally I read a paper that is so well written, and which addressed the points so accurately and so eloquently, that I rejoice.  The paper by Pettifer et al . entitled Ceci n’est pas un hamburger: modelling and representing the scholarly article that appeared in Learned Publishing last October [1], is one of this special handful.

What a year it has been!  Four key meetings were held during 2011, bringing together academics, computer scientists and scholarly publishers to discuss the future of scholarly communication.

Is Data Publication the Right Metaphor? is an essay by Mark Parsons and Peter Fox to be published in the Data Science Journal, for which a preprint has been provided for open pre-publication community peer review at http://mp-datamatters.blogspot.com/2011/12/seeking-open-review-of-provocative-data.html.

Many people will be familiar with Tim Berners-Lee’s five stars of linked data, categorising the publication of data on the web in levels of increasing usefulness.

In biology, the fields of macromolecular structural biology and sequence bioinformatics have, since the 1970s, had established international databases for the deposition of data, and journal policies mandating such deposition prior to acceptance for publication of manuscripts describing the data.  Similar good practices have developed more recently in other disciplines, notably astronomy.

In the previous post, I outlined reasons why researchers don’t publish data, presented as evidence to the Royal Society’s Policy Study “Science as a Public Enterprise” Call for Evidence.

Evidence submitted by David Shotton in response to the Royal Society’s Policy Study “Science as a Public Enterprise” Call for Evidence, addressing the following two topics raised by that call: Getting Researcher buy-in. How do we get researchers to be more willing to share data? What is there to be learned from disciplines such as genomics which have norms which favour wide sharing of data?

Alistair Miles, of SKOS fame, who formerly worked in our research group, spent yesterday afternoon catching up with us, and has written a nice blog post on the MalariaGEN Informatics Blog describing our current activities, including our work on the Open Citations Corpus, and how they might intersect with the data management activities of the MalariaGEN, the Malaria Genome Epidemiology Network for which he now works.

Data copied from JISC Expo DOAP (Description of a Project) spreadsheet at https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ArsNASxXZiL6dC1mWWFMMjRWSmVha0E1WmdlQ05KcEE&hl=en#gid=7. Project title : The Open Citations Project Project tag : jiscopencite Short project description We will publish reference lists from Open Access biomedical journal articles as Linked Open Citation Data at

As part of the Open Citations Project, Alex Dutton recently completed a graphing plug-in for the Open Citations web site, that permits users to generate different kinds of graphs of citation networks by querying the Open Citation Corpus for a particular article, and either display the network of papers citing that article (input citations), papers cited by that article (output citations), or both.