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. The conference is about science communication in the broadest sense, and has three strands that focus on science communication, science policy and tools.

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. I was the guest editor for the five altmetrics articles, and in the editorial that I titled Altmetrics have come of age I argued that We no longer need to talk about whether it is possible to reliably collect altmetrics, or whether this is valuable information that can complement citations and usage statistics.

According to the description on the Citation Style Language (CSL) website, CSL is an open XML-based language to describe the formatting of citations and bibliographies.

Now that I can automatically import my publications from my ORCID profile and display them in this blog, I also want to visualize them. I have started with d3.js code that displays the number of publications per year - using the list of my publications in Citeproc JSON format.

A common feature of blogs written by scientists is a listing of all their publications. Publication lists are a great way to provide background information about your research. Publication lists should provide links to the fulltext versions of these publications, should be nicely formatted - e.g. using a common citation style such as APA - and should be easy to maintain.

The standard local file formats for bibliographic data are probably bibtex and RIS. They have been around for a long time, and are supported by all reference managers and many other tools and services.