In October I published an essay on Article-Level Metrics (ALM) in PLOS Biology (Fenner, 2013). The essay is a good introduction into Article-Level Metrics, and I am proud that it is part of the Tenth Anniversary PLOS Biology Collection. Like all PLOS content, the article was published with a Creative Commons attribution license, allowing me to republish the article on this blog. I have now done so and the article is available here.

Article-level metrics (ALMs) provide a wide range of metrics about the uptake of an individual journal article by the scientific community after publication. They include citations, usage statistics, discussions in online comments and social media, social bookmarking, and recommendations.

Opening Science: The Evolving Guide on How the Internet is Changing Research, Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing is a SpringerOpen book (using a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license) that will be published in a few weeks. If you can’t wait for the book to be published and/or you want to make comments or suggestions, go to the dynamic book online version at http://book.openingscience.org.

Authoring of scholarly articles is a recurring theme in this blog since it started in 2008. Authoring is still in desperate need for improvement, and nobody has convincingly figured out how to solve this problem. Authoring involves several steps, and it helps to think about them separately: Writing . Manuscript writing, including formatting, collaborative authoring Submission .

Last Friday and Saturday the 6th SpotOn London conference tool place at the British Library. I had a great time with many interesting sessions and good conversations both in and between sessions. But I might be biased, since I helped organize the event, and in particular did help put the sessions for the Tools strand together.

This Friday and Saturday the SpotOn London Conference will take place at the British Library in London. I am very excited, as I have come to this conference since the first one in 2008, and have helped organize the event since 2009.

I think it is fair to say that commenting on scientific papers is broken. And with commenting I mean online comments that are publicly available, not informal discussions in journal clubs or at meetings. This definition would include discussions of papers on social media such as Twitter or Facebook. Why do I think that commenting is broken?the number of papers with online comments is low.

Yesterday PLOS Biology published an essay by me: What Can Article Level Metrics Do for You? (Fenner, 2013). I had help from many others in writing the essay, in particular PLOS Biology editor Emma Ganley. I hope that the essay can help researchers get introduced to article-level metrics, and I am honored that the essay is part of the PLOS Biology 10th anniversary collection.

Open access to research data is becoming increasingly important, as manifested by memos or press releases from the Wellcome Trust, the European Commission, and the the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) from the White House.

Yesterday we created a set of roughly 10,000 DOIs for journal articles published in 2011 or 2012. We used these DOIs as a reference set in a data hackathon around article-level metrics/altmetrics - material for another blog post. The random DOis were generated using the CrossRef RanDOIm service, with article titles fetched from the CrossRef OpenURL API.

Ten days ago Information Standards Quarterly (ISQ) published a special issue on altmetrics.