Doing scientific research is becoming increasingly complex, both in terms of the tools and technologies used, and in the collaboration across disciplines and locations that is increasingly commonplace. While the way we write up and publish research is of course also very different from 25 years ago, I would argue that our tools and services haven’t quite evolved at the same pace.

One of the important outcomes of the Markdown for Science workshop that took place in June 2013 was a decision on a name - Scholarly Markdown - and a brief definition: 1. Markdown that supports the requirements of scientific texts 2. Markdown as format that glues open scientific text resources together 3. A reference implementation with documentation and tests 4. A community In my eyes this is still a great definition.

One of the major challenges of writing a journal article is to keep track of versions - both the different versions you create as the document progresses, and to merge in the changes made by your collaborators. For most academics Microsoft Word is the default writing tool, and it is both very good and very bad in this.

In July and August I attended the Open Knowledge Festival and Wikimania. At both events I had many interesting discussions around open source tools for open access scholarly publishing, and I was part of a panel on that topic at Wikimania last Sunday.

One topic I will cover this Sunday in a presentation on Open Scholarship Tools at Wikimania 2014 together with Ian Mulvany is visualization. Data visualization is all about telling stories with data, something that is of course not only important for scholarly content, but for example increasingly common in journalism. This is a big and complex topic, but I hope the following will get you started.

This Sunday Ian Mulvany and I will do a presentation on Open Scholarship Tools at Wikimania 2014 in London. From the abstract: This presentation will give a broad overview of tools and standards that are helping with Open Scholarship today.

Before all our content turned digital, we already used page numbers to describe a specific section of a book or longer document, with older manuscripts using the folio before that. Page numbers have transitioned to electronic books with readers such as the Kindle supporting them eventually. For content on the web we can use the # fragment identifier, e.g.

Yesterday 60 years ago the first volume of the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien was published. The quote above obviously doesn’t quiet apply to scholarly publishing, but one recurring theme that I have often heard in the last few years is that of a need for a canonical digital document format for scholarly content that rules all other formats.

In a post last week I talked about roads and stagecoaches, and how work on scholarly infrastructure can often be more important than building customer-facing apps. One important aspect of that infrastructure work is to not duplicate efforts. A good example is information (or metadata) about scholarly publications. I am the technical lead for the open source article-level metrics (ALM) software.

I attended the Open Knowledge Festival this week and I had a blast. For three days (I also attended the fringe event csv,conf on Tuesday) I listed to wonderful presentations and was involved in great discussions - both within sessions, but more importantly all the informal discussions between and after sessions.

Literate Programming by Donald Knuth (1983) is a seminal book that introduces the concept of literate programming. Using technology available in 2014 we can make a small but important change to the last sentence: This blog post is an example for such a document.