This weekend I was at SciFoo, an invitation-only unconference by O'Reilly Media, Nature and Google that took place at Google. I was fortunate to be invited, and I'm still digesting all the impressions and discussions that I had (there were many). This post is the indirect result of two sessions and several related discussions on one particular topic that I'm most interested in – the process of scientific publication.

SciBarCamp Palo Alto took place July 8-9 in the Institute for the Future. I came right from the airport and arrived too late for the general introductions and session suggestions. But there was time for a little break before Sean Mooney started his keynote lecture.

Problem You want to regularly go through the papers published in the most important journals in your research field. Solution Subscribe to the journal table of contents (TOC) RSS feed. Almost all journals now provide their TOC as RSS feed that is updated with every new issue. RSS is a standard web format used to publish frequently updated works.

The term digital divide usually describes the troubling gap between those who use computers and the Internet and those who do not (Wikipedia). Many if not most scientists are experienced users of computers and the internet, and use email or public databases such as PubMed on a daily basis.

I just returned from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Orlando, with approximately 30.000 participants one of the largest oncology conferences. Like other conferences of this size, the experience can be overwhelming, but thankfully the organizers are getting better every year in using technology that helps in finding the most interesting sessions.

Google Wave is a new tool to communicate online and collaborate and was announced today at the Google I/O conference. Google Wave is not only a product, but also an open protocol that anyone can use to build his own wave server.

Most of us find, store and sometimes read scientific papers electronically. Although abstracts and full-text papers are usually available as web pages in HTML format, PDF is clearly the preferred format for storing and printing papers. But publishing scientific papers in electronic form obviously requires more than providing the content in HTML or PDF format.

Reference managers are essential tools to read and write scholarly papers. In the last few years we have seen both a number of new reference managers (most of them web-based), but also a trend for the established reference managers to gain social networking features. More choice is great, but it also creates confusion about the right tool to use.

Scientific papers are submitted to a journal as word processor files, usually in Microsoft Word format. After the paper is accepted for publication, the journal takes the manuscript and translates the text into a format that is better suited for publication online and/or in print. XML and the NLM DTD – a set of XML schema modules – have evolved as the standard data format for this purpose.

Richard Grant, who needs no introduction here on Nature Network, has just moved to London to start a new job as information architect for Faculty of 1000. I took this opportunity to ask Richard a few questions not only about Faculty of 1000, but also about his role in the company and future plans for the service that they have in mind. 1. Can you describe what Faculty of 1000 is and does? The scientific literature is immense, and growing.

I've recently asked a few questions about author identifiers for scientists. Here are the results (based on 48 responses). The results are also available as .xls file.