Two weeks ago Eva Amsen wrote in a thoughtful blog post: There’s a gap between science and technology, and it’s growing. 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.
In early December Knowledge Exchange, a partnership of JISC (United Kingdom), SURF (Netherlands), DEFF (Denmark), and DFG (Germany) released a report on submission fees that they had commissioned to Mark Ware Consulting. The report was also discussed by Robert Kiley on the UK PubMed Central blog and by Phil Davis on the Scholarly Kitchen blog. Submission fees are more common than I thought, particularly in economics and the life sciences.
Four weeks ago I wrote about the Beyond the PDF workshop that is planned for January in San Diego. The goal of the workshop is to identify a set of requirements, and a group of willing participants to develop open source code to accelerate scientific knowledge sharing. The Google Group for the workshop has already seen a lot of interesting discussions.
In December I am hosting the blog carnival Medical Information Matters, a blog carnival about – medical information . The deadline for submissions is next Tuesday, and I have already received a number of interesting posts.
Earlier today I gave this presentation at the DINI/Helmholtz Repositories Workshop in Berlin. I’m looking forward to the second day tomorrow.
When we want to change something, we have to look at the incentives for those involved.References Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access: researchers’ views and responses. In: Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects , Chandos.
On Monday I was finally able to start the clinical trial Everolimus for patients with relapsed/refractory germ cell cancer (RADIT), and I’m now looking forward to recruit the first patient. We aim to treat 25 patients with cancer of the testis with the mTOR inhibitor everolimus in this phase II trial, and eight German hospitals are participating.
On Saturday I went to see the exhibition Evolving English at the British Library in London.
Last Tuesday Nucleic Acids Research published a nice paper describing the UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) database (McEntyre 2010). UKPMC was started in 2007, the enhanced version described in the paper was launched January 2010. In November 2009 I published an interview with Phil Vaughan, the senior author of the paper.