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.

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. The issue also contains an interview (“The m word”) with astrophysicist Marc Kuchner who published a book titled Marketing for Scientists.

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.

fig share allows researchers to publish all of their research outputs in seconds in an easily citable, sharable and discoverable manner . The service was started by Mark Hahnel last year while still a PhD student. Mark joined Digital Science to work on fig share in September and last month relaunched a much improved version of the service. I asked Mark a few questions about fig share below.

Earlier this week I wrote a guest post for the Impact of Social Sciences blog.

Zotero 3.0 was officially released today. The big change in version 3.0 of the reference manager is a standalone version that runs outside the Firefox browser. The first beta was released in August 2011.

Faculty 1000 today announced F1000 Research , a new fully Open Access publishing program across biology and medicine, that will start publishing later this year . The default open access license is CC-BY, and CC0 for data.