This has been another week working on visualizations. I have summarised some of the results in a blog post over at the PLoS API website. One of my current favorites is the dot chart. PLoS Computational Biology publishes a collection of Ten Simple Rules. The dot chart below summarizes the HTML pageviews, PDF downloads and Mendeley readers for this collection.

The European Research Council on Friday announced that they will participate in the UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) open access repository service. They become the third European funder to join UKPMC, and the existing UKPMC funders have agreed to rebrand UKPMC as Europe PubMed Central (abbreviated to EPMC?) on November 1st. More information about these changes can be found on the UKPMC blog and in the Wellcome Trust press release.

DNA Barcoding the Native Flowering Plants and Conifers of Wales has been one of the most popular new PLoS ONE papers in June. In the paper Natasha de Vere et al. describe a DNA barcode resource that covers the 1143 native Welsh flowering plants and conifers. My new job as technical lead for the PLoS Article Level Metrics (ALM) project involves thinking about how we can best display the ALM collected for this and other papers.

Last week I attended the altmetrics12 workshop in Chicago. You can read all 11 abstracts here, and the conference had good Twitter coverage (using the hashtag #altmetrics12), at least until Twitter had a total blackout around 12 PM our time. All but two presenters used slides – I have uploaded my presentation to Speaker Deck.

It has become common practice to make presentation slides available for those unable to attend in person, or for more in-depth review later. The most popular service to do this is of course Slideshare. Slideshare is a fine service, but the website has become fairly cluttered over the years, and visuals are of course important when it comes to presentations. Speaker Deck is an alternative to Slideshare with a focus on “simplicity and beauty”.

This blog occasionally does interviews with people providing interesting tools for scholars. These interviews have always been among my favorite blog posts. This now is obviously an interview with myself, but I felt this is the best format to explain some important news. Starting May 16 I will be working full-time as technical lead for the PLoS Article Level Metrics (ALM) project.

The April issue of Nature Materials contains three articles that discuss marketing strategies for scientists. The Editorial (“The scientific marketplace”) introduces the topic and explains why scientists should consider marketing their work.

Altmetrics – tools to assess the impact of scholarly works based on alternative online measures such as bookmarks, links, blog posts, etc. –have become a regular topic in this blog. The altmetrics manifesto was published in October 2010, and in the last 18 months we have seen a number of interesting new altmetrics services, including the ScienceCard service that I started six months ago.

This was another week with a fair amount of spam in my email inbox. We all receive email spam on a regular basis and most of us have probably also received science spam: invitations to scientific conferences about topics we are not working on, invitations to submit articles to journals not covering your field, and information about lab supplies we never had asked for.

In December Euan Adie and I started the CrowdoMeter project, an analysis of the semantic content of tweets linking to scholarly papers. Because classifying almost 500 tweets is a lot of work, we turned this into a crowdsourcing project. We got help from 36 people, who did 953 classifications, and we discussed the preliminary results (available here) at the ScienceOnline2012 conference.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a big fan of the reference manager Papers – three years ago we even had a poetry contest when the iPhone version was first released. The strength of Papers has always been the very nice user interface, and Papers 2 released last March was a major update that added many more reference types, collaboration and a word processor plugin.