I’m very proud to report that ScienceCard last week has been named finalist in the Mendeley/PLoS API Binary Battle. Not bad for a project that started only two months ago in a hackathon following the Science Online London conference and is done in my spare time. The winners of the contest will be named on November 30, but I’m more than happy that the project has even gotten this far.

BibTeX is one of the most popular file formats for bibliographies, and is therefore commonly used to transfer bibliographies from one reference manager to another, or to other applications that handle bibliographic references. RIS and Endnote XML are probably the other two bibliographic file formats most commonly used. Most reference managers support all three formats, making it easy to move references around.

Last week I attended the Transforming Scholarly Communication workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The main goal of the workshop was to come up with practical recommendations for the topics #resources #review #literature #media #recognition and #platforms: The workshop started with product demos (18 demos in a little over three hours!), we then spent two half days working in smaller groups on one of the six topics above.

Reinventing Discovery, the book by Michael Nielsen we all have been waiting for, has finally been published on Friday. Today I flew to Boston for the Microsoft Research eScience Workshop: Transforming Scholarly Communication, and reading the book on the plane was the perfect preparation for the workshop.

Earlier this week Alex Ball and Monica Duke from the Digital Curation Centre released the how-to guide Cite Datasets and Link to Publications. The guide is highly recommended reading for everyone interested in data citation.

The shortDOI service was launched by the International DOI Foundation (IDF) in May 2010. The service creates short versions of the often long DOIs, e.g. 10/dvq instead of 10.1093/hmg/ddp202 – written as URL this would be http://doi.org/dvq instead of http://doi.org/10.1093/hmg/ddp202.

Today, Digital Science announced an investment in startup Labtiva. And Labtiva released a “community preview” of their reference manager ReadCube. The community preview is a free download for Windows and Mac, and this is the summary of my first impressions. You could write two different reviews about ReadCube. The first version would mention the really slick interface, and the fun you have using the program.

ScienceCard is a new service that I started last month with the simple idea to automatically track all journal articles of a given author, and to collect the article-level metrics (citations, bookmarks, etc.) for these papers. ScienceCard requires unique identifiers for articles and authors to work. Unique identifiers for authors is a difficult topic regularly discussed in this blog.

Metrics for scholarly works are used for evaluation and discovery. The Journal Impact Factor is widely used, but is not the best tool to look at the metrics of an individual article. In the past few years we finally started to have the technology to do article-level metrics (citations, downloads, etc.) and PLoS has pushed this concept since at least 2009.

The Science Online London 2011 Conference was a great event that took place last Friday and Saturday. I was able to celebrate the first PLoS Blogs anniversary together with community manager Brian Mossop , but a detailed conference post will follow later. The blog posts covering the event are here, and the list is growing by the hour.

At the Science Online London Conference later this week I will moderate a session on microattribution , together with Mike Peel, Bora Zivkovic and Scott Edmunds. I thought that microattribution would be an established concept, so I was surprised to find so little information about it. Wikipedia doesn’t know about microattribution.