On Tuesday we released the latest version of the PLOS Article-Level Metrics application. As always, the source code is available at Github.

Today the journal Nature has released a special on the Future of Publishing. It includes a lot of interesting reading, but I want to focus on the comment Beyond the Paper by Jason Priem.

The Beyond the PDF Conference is currently taking place in Amsterdam. Unfortunately, I am unable to attend in person this time (I took part in the first Beyond the PDF in January 2011), but I was watching the livestream of the Business Case panel discussion yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday Google announced that they will shut down Google Reader July 1st. In a way this announcement didn’t surprise me, as my own use of RSS readers has gone down in favor of news readers such as Flipboard and using Twitter as a discovery tool.

Following up from my post last week, below is a suggested list of features that should be supported in documents written in scholarly markdown. Please provide feedback via the comments, or by editing the Wiki version I have set up here. Listed are features that go beyond the standard markdown syntax.

Markdown is a lightweight markup language, originally created by John Gruber for writing content for the web. Other popular lightweight markup languages are Textile and Mediawiki. Whereas Mediawiki markup is of course popular thanks to the ubiquitous Wikipedia, Markdown seems to have gained momentum among scholars.

Last week has been busy. I went to Berlin for the launch of the Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) service. ORCID allows researchers to obtain a persistent identifier that can be used to claim publications and other scholarly works.

Almost exactly a year ago (in the hackathon of the Science Online London 2011 conference) I started the ScienceCard project. ScienceCard is a fork of the Open Source PLOS Article-Level Metrics (ALM) code, personalizing the Article-Level Metrics. A lot has happened in the last 12 months, most importantly that I started to work for PLOS as technical lead for the Article-Level Metrics project in May.

The science blogging network Nature Network is moving to a new home. Today SciLogs.com launched as a new home for Nature Network bloggers. I have been blogging at Nature Network for three years, starting with my first blog post (Open access may become mandatory for NIH-funded research) almost exactly 5 years ago to the day. My blog moved to PLOS BLOGS in September 2010 and all my old Nature Network content can be found here at PLOS BLOGS.

Inspired by four recent blog posts and their comments (Comments at journal websites: just turn them off, Open Access and The Dramatic Growth of PLoS ONE, No Comment?, If you email it, they will comment), I created a graphic to show what users do with PLoS ONE papers. As always, the data behind the graphic are openly available.

Earlier this week the European Commission announced new measures towards open science. As part of the announcement interviews of three scientists with European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes were posted on YouTube.