The Front Matter Blog covers the intersection of science and technology since 2007.

Medizinische Hochschule Hannover

Martin Fenner

Just four weeks ago I wrote a blog post titled How do you read papers? 2010 will be different. Not only have we since seen the announcement of the Apple iPad, but last Monday the free Nature.com iPhone app was launched.

Nature.com iPhone app in pictures

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.

Marketing for Scientists

Dear Scientist, last week you published an interesting article by

 
 Christian Specht
 

about Mutations of citations. Dr. Specht found more than 600 wrong citations for the paper by Laemmli (Laemmli 1970), which has been cited at least 88633 times according to Scopus.

 
 Laemmli UK
 

. Cleavage of Structural Proteins during the Assembly of the Head of Bacteriophage T4.

Letter to The Scientist

The 2008 Nobel Prizes will be announced next week, starting with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday. There will be a live webcast on Monday at 9:30 AM GMT for those interested

 1

. As every year just before the announcement, speculation about this year's winners is in full swing. M. William Lensch, here on Nature Network correctly predicted last year's winners

 2

, and this year he is trying it again

 3

.

Someone who should have won a Nobel Prize

Participation in a social network can have it's perks. Thanks to the O'Reilly Group on Facebook (that other social network), I received a review copy of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. But why would a scientist want to know how to write and edit articles on Wikipedia? Wikipedia has become a respectable source of information that rivals the more traditional encylopedias such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Is Wikipedia for Scientists?

The STIX Project has finally released a first beta version of their fonts. STIX stands for Scientific and Technical Information Exchange and the fonts were designed specifically for publishing scientific or mathematical texts.

STIX: Fonts for electronic and print publishing

Front Matter

The science blog archive that I have started to work on (see previous posts) finally has a name: the

 Rogue Scholar

. I picked this name because I liked the description in the Urban Dictionary.

Sign up for the science blog archive waitlist

DataCite

CSV (comma-separated values) is a popular file format for data. It is popular because it is very simple: CSV is text-based and any application that can open text files can read or write CSV. This makes it a good fit for digital preservation. We don't know how many of the datasets in DataCite use CSV because the format metadata attribute is not used much (this query gives you some examples), but we know that the number is big.

Using YAML Frontmatter with CSV

In the first post of this new blog a few weeks ago I talked about Data-Driven Development, and that service monitoring is an important aspect of this. The main service DataCite is providing is registration of digital object identifiers (DOIs) for scholarly content, in particular research data. Monitoring this service should include the following:number of DOIs registeredmetadata associated with these DOIsare the DOIs working as expected, e.g.

Digging into Metadata using R

Literate programming is a methodology that combines a programming language with a documentation language, thereby making programs more robust, more portable, more easily maintained, and arguably more fun to write than programs that are written only in a high-level language. The main idea is to treat a program as a piece of literature, addressed to human beings rather than to a computer.

Public Library of Science

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.

Literate Blogging

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.

What is the Value of Hack Days?

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.

What Can Article-Level Metrics Do for You?

Open Researcher &amp; Contributor ID (ORCID) provides a persistent identifier for researchers and lets them claim their research outputs in the ORCID Registry. I have been involved with ORCID since early 2010 and I am happy to see that nine months after launch 200,000 researchers have signed up for the service, and the organization has more than 70 member organizations.

RSS Feeds for Scholarly Authors

One important outcome of the recent Markdown for Science workshop was an overall agreement that all the different implementations (or flavors) of markdown that currently exist are a big problem for the adoption of Scholarly Markdown and that we need: As described by Karthik Ram (31 flavors is great for ice cream but not markdown), me and others, there is really a large number of markdown implementations to choose from, includingJohn Gruber’s

What Flavor is Scholarly Markdown?

On Saturday, June 8th – exactly a month from today – the PLOS San Francisco offices will host a workshop/hackathon about using markdown for science. A lot of people are experimenting with markdown for authoring scientific articles – see blog posts here, here or my post here, and the scientific manuscript here.

Announcing Markdown for Science Workshop on June 8th

Earlier this week the European Commission announced new measures towards open science. As part of the announcement interviews of three scientists with European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes were posted on YouTube.

Neelie Kroes talks Open Science

The science blogging network Nature Network is moving to a new home. Today SciLogs.com launched as a new home for Nature Network bloggers. I have been blogging at Nature Network for three years, starting with my first blog post (Open access may become mandatory for NIH-funded research) almost exactly 5 years ago to the day. My blog moved to PLOS BLOGS in September 2010 and all my old Nature Network content can be found here at PLOS BLOGS.

Bye bye Nature Network, welcome SciLogs.com

Last week I attended the altmetrics12 workshop in Chicago. You can read all 11 abstracts here, and the conference had good Twitter coverage (using the hashtag #altmetrics12), at least until Twitter had a total blackout around 12 PM our time. All but two presenters used slides – I have uploaded my presentation to Speaker Deck.

Random notes from the altmetrics12 conference

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.

Zotero 3.0 Released

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.

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.

Say Hello to F1000 Research

Starting this week, users of the science blog archive Rogue Scholar can sign in into the service using their ORCID credentials.

Rogue Scholar enables sign-in with ORCID

I’m very proud to report that ScienceCard last week has been named finalist in the Mendeley/PLoS API Binary Battle. Not bad for a project that started only two months ago in a hackathon following the Science Online London conference and is done in my spare time. The winners of the contest will be named on November 30, but I’m more than happy that the project has even gotten this far.

ScienceCard named Finalist in Mendeley/PLoS API Binary Battle

The Science Online London 2011 Conference was a great event that took place last Friday and Saturday. I was able to celebrate the first

 PLoS Blogs

anniversary together with community manager

 Brian Mossop

, but a detailed conference post will follow later. The blog posts covering the event are here, and the list is growing by the hour.

Hacking the PLoS Article-Level Metrics API Server

Last week the first Alpha version of Annotum was released. Annotum is “a scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress”. I first learned about Annotum at the Beyond the PDF workshop in January. One of the themes of the workshop was that we need better tools for authoring, reviewing and publishing of scholarly articles.

Last week the first Alpha version of

 
 Annotum
 

was released. Annotum is “a scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress”. I first learned about Annotum at the Beyond the PDF workshop in January. One of the themes of the workshop was that we need better tools for authoring, reviewing and publishing of scholarly articles.

Annotum: Publishing with WordPress soon coming to a journal near you

This week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive has added author affiliation name and ROR ID to the DOI metadata of about 2,500 of its 15K blog posts registered with Crossref. This makes Front Matter (the Crossref member registering Rogue Scholar DOIs) one of the top 10 ROR early adopters in Crossref metadata.

Rogue Scholar has added author affiliation metadata

The reference management software Papers has been a regular topic on this blog.

Papers 2: the reference manager made with love

The bibliography of a scholarly paper is interesting and important reading material. You can see whether the authors have cited the relevant literature, and you often find references to interesting papers you didn’t know about. Bibliographies are obviously also needed to count citations, and then do all kinds of useful and not so useful things with them. Unfortunately almost all bibliographies are in the wrong format.

The Trouble with Bibliographies

Two weeks ago Eva Amsen wrote in a thoughtful blog post: There’s a gap between science and technology, and it’s growing. Eva argues that – contrary to popular belief – there is actually a divide between science and technology. Scientists are on average not really comfortable using technology, and many computing tools aimed for scientists really miss the point of what scientists really care about.

Two weeks ago

 
 Eva Amsen
 

wrote in a thoughtful blog post: Eva argues that – contrary to popular belief – there is actually a divide between science and technology. Scientists are on average not really comfortable using technology, and many computing tools aimed for scientists really miss the point of what scientists really care about.

Digital Science launched: closing the gap between science and technology?

In December I am hosting the blog carnival Medical Information Matters, a blog carnival about –

 
 medical information
 

. The deadline for submissions is next Tuesday, and I have already received a number of interesting posts.

Medical Information Matters

Earlier today I gave this presentation at the DINI/Helmholtz Repositories Workshop in Berlin. I’m looking forward to the second day tomorrow.

Repositories: Researcher Perspective

On Wednesday the NCBI released an Images database, compiled from full text resources at the NCBI – initially PubMed Central articles. The images can be searched by several parameters, e.g. figure caption or author. Using this database, images are now displayed together with the PubMed abstract for PubMed Central articles. More info about these changes can be found in the NLM Bulletin.

NCBI adds searchable images database

The iPad owners among the PLoS BLOGs readers can use the free Flipboard application to read all the great content that is written by my fellow ploggers PLoGsters (as suggested by David Kroll). In Flipboard simply create a new section and then add content to it by following the @plosblogs Twitter account. There are of course many other ways Flipboard can be used to follow science blogs, e.g. by following the @researchblogs Twitter account.

Flipboard: PLoS BLOGs on the iPad

The iPad was released six months ago, and we already have several reference managers available for the platform. Reading the PDF of a scientific paper on an iPad is a positive experience, and to me very different from reading the PDF on a regular computer.

Reference Management with the iPad

Citation styles are one of the greater mysteries for the novice manuscript writer. There are numerous ways that authors, title, journal, etc. can be arranged and formatted (see examples below), and in bibliographies citations can be ordered either alphabetically or by order of appearance in the text.

 
 Laemmli UK
 

. Cleavage of Structural Proteins during the Assembly of the Head of Bacteriophage T4.

Citation Style Language: Interview with Rintze Zelle and Ian Mulvany

One of the main themes at the Science Online London Conference last weekend was

 
 data
 

, with several sessions devoted to publishing primary research data, connecting scientific data from various resources, and a scientific experiment taking place before and during the conference (Green Chain reaction). David McCandless talked about Data Visualization, a fascinating way to filter and make sense of the enormous

Data is the new soil

In March 2009 I posted an overview chart of how popular reference managers have implemented some important features. I’ve since updated this chart several times, and the chart probably has outgrown the format of a blog post.

Update of Reference Manager Overview Chart

On Monday Jenny Rohn published a blog post Peer review is no picnic that concludes: So the next time you hear someone asserting that scientists aren’t critical, of their own work or that of their colleagues, remember that if a finding has made its way into a reputable journal, it’s most likely despite every last objection that the researcher and all of his lab-mates could come up with – to say nothing of those nasty peer reviewers.

On Monday

 
 Jenny Rohn
 

published a blog post Peer review is no picnic that concludes: As always with Jenny’s blog posts, the discussion is as interesting as the blog post itself.

Peer review is not a piece of cake

Flipboard is a personalized social magazine for the iPad. The free application was released on July 22, and instantly created a lot of buzz. Because of the overwhelming interest, they had to create a waitlist for the personal features and I could only sign up for and start using them a few days ago. Flipboard is a true iPad application, it would not work the same on a laptop computer or mobile phone.

Flipboard is a

 
 personalized social magazine
 

for the iPad. The free application was released on July 22, and instantly created a lot of buzz. Because of the overwhelming interest, they had to create a waitlist for the personal features and I could only sign up for and start using them a few days ago. Flipboard is a true iPad application, it would not work the same on a laptop computer or mobile phone.

Flipboard changes the way we use Twitter

Earlier today I attended the fabulous Innovations in Reference Management workshop in Birmingham organized by Owen Stephens from Open University. Owen has written some blog posts summarizing the sessions almost in real time. You also find a good number of interesting tweets under the hashtag #irm10.

Innovations in Reference Management

In September PLoS started to show usage data (downloads, citations, but also use of social bookmarking services and blog posts) for all their published papers (article-level metrics at PLoS: addition of usage data). PLoS is not the first publisher to do that, but certainly the largest to date.

In September

 
 PLoS
 

started to show usage data (downloads, citations, but also use of social bookmarking services and blog posts) for all their published papers (article-level metrics at PLoS: addition of usage data).

 
 PLoS
 

is not the first publisher to do that, but certainly the largest to date.

Moving article-level metrics forward

The final guest post by Alex Knoll reporting from the German Genetics Society Meeting in Cologne.
 

Session V Friday ended with two talks in session V, the first by Tony Hyman from the Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden. He looked at the ways that cells structure and organize their cytoplasm by comparison with non-biological systems.

German Genetics Society Meeting 2009: Session V and VII

Another guest post by Alex Knoll reporting from the German Genetics Society Meeting in Cologne.
 

As promised, I attended the second Plant Genetics session of the meeting, thus missing the Epigenetics session. I learned an important lesson at the first talk by Juliette de Meaux from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research: Bring sweets for the audience, and you have everyone on your side!

German Genetics Society Meeting 2009: Session Plant Genetics II

Another guest post by Alex Knoll reporting from the German Genetics Society Meeting in Cologne.
 

Just after lunch the next decision: Neurogenetics or Evolution? Here I went with the topic that is less far from my field, and attended the evolution session.

German Genetics Society Meeting 2009: Evolution Session

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.

I was at SciBarCamp Palo Alto

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.

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.

How to close the digital divide among scientists

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.

eXtyles: Interview with Elizabeth Blake and Bruce Rosenblum

Practically all scientific journals now use web-based systems for paper submissions and peer review. This saves the authors a lot of time compared to paper submissions by postal mail (until 15 years ago) or email (until 5 years ago). Unfortunately the submission process is still far from perfect and requires authors to spend many hours formatting manuscripts, references and images instead of focusing on the scientific content.

Editorial Manager: Interview with Richard Wynne

Direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) – advertising for prescription drugs – is only allowed in the United States (since 1997, when restrictions were loosened) and New Zealand. Drug companies pay for direct to consumer advertising (more than $4 billion in 2005 (Donohue 2007)) because they believe that it increases prescription rates.

Open access is not enough – the source is also important

Today is Open Access Day

 1

, intended to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access.

Open Access – what’s in it for me?

In the last few months we have seen an ever increasing number of new social networking (Web 2.0) sites for scientists. Good Web 2.0 tools for scientists primarily try to solve a problem. But by adding a social aspect, they will gain useful features that would otherwise not be possible.

Mendeley: Interview with Victor Henning

Most scientific papers are now published in English, and I believe that this trend is good for international collaboration. Therefore I believe that blogs intended for scientists should also be written in English.

Science Blogging in German

One of the opening lectures this Saturday of the International Congress of Genetics was held by Mario Capecchi. His talked was entitled

 Modeling human disease in the mouse: from cancer to neuropsychiatric disorders

. In the first half he described his mouse model of synovial sarcoma. Synovial sarcoma is an aggressive and often fatal soft tissue tumor.

Mouse models of human cancer and the need for more translational research

A year ago today I wrote my first blog post on Nature Network (

 Open access may become mandatory for NIH-funded research

). This is blog post #84 one year later and a good time to reflect on the experience. In May of last year I started the science blog

 in a nutshell

, hosted on my own server and written just for fun.

Looking back on a year of gobbledygook

As I said before on this blog, I do like poster sessions. The poster sessions at the just finished American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting didn't offer food and drink, but were otherwise very enjoyable. The meeting is probably special because a lot of high quality research will be presented as poster, as there is just not enough time for enough oral sessions. Many of the poster presenters were senior faculty.

I like poster sessions

Google Publish or Perish is a new science writing tool that facilitates paper submissions. The tool was field-tested at the NIH and should be particularly valuable for open access and public access journals. Accepted papers are automatically added to your Researcher ID account. For more information, read this forum post by Matt Brown.

Publish or Perish: no longer just a buzzword

The new NIH Public Access policy started this past Monday. Fellow Nature Networker Graham Steel has summarized this week's reaction of the blogosphere. I would like to highlight some of the discussions we had here on Nature Network. Bob O'Hara wonders about the cost of publishing in Open Access: Show us the Money!. He argues that shifting the costs from reader to author can create problems.

Public Access Week: Personal Summary

A March 13 Nature News article (Six degrees of messaging) talks about a study on Microsoft Messenger chat users. Any random two Microsoft Messenger users (out of about 240 million) could be connected two each other via an average of 6 users that have chatted with each other. This study is just another confirmation of the six degrees of separation concept.

Six degrees of separation on Nature Network

Nature News this week reports that Seven US-educated scientists working at the Max Planck Society's institutes are facing criminal charges for impersonating a doctor. This extremely embarrassing story is fortunately no longer possible. The German Kultusministerkonferenz decided on March 6 (text in German) to allow U.S. PhDs to call themselves Dr. in Germany. Until this story evolved, I didn't even know that this is an issue.

Nature News this week reports that This extremely embarrassing story is fortunately no longer possible. The German Kultusministerkonferenz decided on March 6 (text in German) to allow U.S. PhDs to call themselves Dr. in Germany. Until this story evolved, I didn't even know that this is an issue.

What is a PhD in Germany?

A Nature News article last week talked about the confusion that happens if a number of authors have the same or similar names (Scientific publishing: Identity crisis). This is apparently a special issue in China because of the difficulties transliterating Chinese characters into English and the use of only a limited number of surnames.

Are names important?

Nature today published a report on the prevalence of duplicate papers in Medline. In this report Mounir Errami and Harold Garner estimate that there as many as 200.000 duplicate papers in Medline or 1% of all published papers. The article has already been widely cited, including of course Nature News and Nature Network, but also Noble Intent and DigitalKoans.

Duplicate Papers: another trick to improve your publication record

A recent Nature article, repeated in a Nautilus blog post, talks about author accountability. The article suggests that at least one author per collaborative group signs a statement with reference to Nature's publication policies. This policy would certainly help avoid

 honorary authorship

, but it can be difficult to enforce in large research projects. I would like to make another suggestion.

How many authors makes a good paper?

January is an important month for Macintosh users. MacWorld Expo takes place every year in San Francisco and we usually see a lot of new software and hardware. The MacBook Air is a wonderful new subnotebook perfect for successful scientists with many talks to give and enough money to spend. But Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is probably the most important new product from a scientists perspective.

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac released

Today I decided to rename my blog from Publish or Perish 2.0 to Goobledygook. The old name explained the topics of this blog pretty well, so why the change after only 4 months of blogging on Nature Network? And there are already many blogs with the same name. I simply like the new name. The word Goobledygook was invented by the U.S. congressman Maury Maverick and used in a New York Times article published May 21, 1944.

Today I decided to rename my blog from

 
 Publish or Perish 2.0
 

to

 
 Goobledygook
 

. The old name explained the topics of this blog pretty well, so why the change after only 4 months of blogging on Nature Network? And there are already many blogs with the same name. I simply like the new name.

A case for Goobledygook

Last weekend I visited my brother-in-law in Cambridge (UK). In the Cambridge University Press bookstore I found the wonderful little book

 
 How to Write and Illustrate a Scientific Paper
 

by Björn Gustavii (Cambridge University Press 2003). On less than 150 pages B. Gustavii gives a good summary of the typical problems and their solutions.

Books about scientific writing

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) today announced that it will support Open Access in Springer journals through the Springer Open Choice program.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute pays for Open Access in Springer journals

OncologySTAT is a new (it launched September 7) web portal by Reed Elsevier that offers, among many other things, full access to journal articles in Elsevier oncology journals. Elsevier hopes to generate enough revenue from selling advertising on the web site to compensate for (potentially) lost journal sales.

OncologySTAT: free access to journal articles from Elsevier oncology journals

Thompson Scientific today announced the release of Endnote X1 for Macintosh. New features include Applescript support, group references and better support for Endnote Web. Endnote X1 for Windows was released in June. In addition to the features above, it supports Microsoft Word 2007 and Vista. Endnote is an essential bibliographic tool for scientific publishing.

Endnote X1 for Macintosh released

Earlier this month, Apple announced the productivity suite iWork 08 for Macintosh users.

iWork 08 ready for scientists?

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is currently recommending public access of all papers from NIH-funded research.

 Fewer than 5% of research papers

have gone this route since the policy went into effect in 2005.

Open access may become mandatory for NIH-funded research

Last week I wrote about the options we have for including DOIs in RSS feeds. This week is implementation time. Starting today, the Atom feed of this blog includes the DOI in the Atom&lt;id&gt; metadata field.

Including DOIs in RSS Feeds: Implementation

Starting in February, the Rogue Scholar science blog archive is showing the citations (publications that cite the blog post) of science blog posts it archives.

Rogue Scholar now shows citations of science blog posts

DOI metadata provenance is describing the history of a particular DOI metadata record, i.e. what changes were made when and by whom. This information is now stored and provided via an API for all DOI registrations since March 10, 2019.

Exposing DOI metadata provenance

This week we relaunched DataCite Search, providing a more user-friendly search interface for DataCite metadata. We also added functionality that was not available before. The new search uses a single entry box for queries, and filters by resource type, publication year and data center. A new Cite button will generate a citation in several popular citation styles, and in BibTeX and RIS import formats.

Relaunching DataCite Search

One of my personal highlights in last week's Research Data Alliance (RDA) 6th Plenary Meeting in Paris was the Data Packages Birds of a Feather (BoF), organized by Rufus Pollock from the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN). He highlighted the urgent need for packacking data in a standard format to facilitate reuse, and described the extensive work the OKFN has done on data packages.

Discussing the Scholarly Container

This blog has been on four different platforms since starting in 2007: a custom blogging engine and then Movable Type on Nature Network 2007-2010, Wordpress on the PLOS Blogs Network 2010-2013, and the static blogging engine Jekyll hosted on Github Pages since 2013. It might be time for yet another blogging platform change.

Blogging Beyond Jekyll

The shortDOI service was launched by the International DOI Foundation (IDF) in May 2010. The service creates short versions of the often long DOIs, e.g.

 
 10/dvq
 

instead of

 
 10.1093/hmg/ddp202
 

– written as URL this would be http://doi.org/dvq instead of http://doi.org/10.1093/hmg/ddp202.

Serving shortDOIs

Metrics for scholarly works are used for evaluation and discovery. The Journal Impact Factor is widely used, but is not the best tool to look at the metrics of an individual article. In the past few years we finally started to have the technology to do article-level metrics (citations, downloads, etc.) and PLoS has pushed this concept since at least 2009.

Announcing ScienceCard

Last Thursday the search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo announced schema.org, a new initiative for structured data markup on the web. Websites that use this schema to markup their data (more than 100 data types are supported) will make it easier for the three largest web search engines to find their content. Schema.org uses microdata, not microformats or RDFa, according to the FAQ this was a pragmatic decision.

Schema.org for Scholarly HTML?

DataCite is an international consortium for data citation. DataCite originally started as a project at the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB). Since 2005 the TIB was providing digital object identifiers (DOIs) to research datasets. In December 2009 research libraries and technical information centres from 6 countries founded the DataCite initiative.

DataCite: visit their new blog

On Saturday I went to see the exhibition Evolving English at the British Library in London.

Evolving English at the British Library

In his new book Cognitive Surplus Clay Shirky argues that in the last 50 years many of those living in industrialized countries have seen a dramatic increase in free time, paired with better education and a higher standard of living. But a very large part of that free time or cognitive surplus is now routinely used to watch television, a passive activity that makes us a consumer rather than a participant.

In his new book

 
 Cognitive Surplus
 

Clay Shirky argues that in the last 50 years many of those living in industrialized countries have seen a dramatic increase in free time, paired with better education and a higher standard of living. But a very large part of that free time or cognitive surplus is now routinely used to watch television, a passive activity that makes us a consumer rather than a participant.

Book Review: Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

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.

What is the right reference manager for you?

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?

Faculty of 1000: Interview with Richard Grant

The British Medical Journal this week published Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial by Phlip Davis et al. There are already several publications that looked at the full paper downloads and citations of open access papers compared to closed access papers.

The

 
 British Medical Journal
 

this week published Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial by Phlip Davis et al. There are already several publications that looked at the full paper downloads and citations of open access papers compared to closed access papers.

Article downloads and citations of open access papers

The German medical journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt did an analysis of the percentage of female first authors over the last 50 years. The number was 0-4% as recently as 25 years ago, but there has been a yearly increase to 18% last year (see this figure), both for submitted and accepted manuscripts. This number corresponds to the percentage of female senior faculty in Germany, but 64% of students starting to study medicine last year were women.

The German medical journal

 
 Deutsches
 
 Ä
 
 rzteblatt
 

did an analysis of the percentage of female first authors over the last 50 years. The number was 0-4% as recently as 25 years ago, but there has been a yearly increase to 18% last year (see this figure), both for submitted and accepted manuscripts.

First authorship by women in a German medical journal

I’ve written a similar post

 before

, put I would like to talk about some of the features that I would like to see in an ideal paper writing application.

 Intelligent Formatting

Content and formatting should be separated from each other.

My Paper Writing Dream Machine 1.0

Around Christmas, mandatory open access for NIH-funded research was signed into law: Starting April 7, the new NIH Public Access Policy implementing this law will take effect for most NIH grantees. The NIH is soliciting comments until May 1st for this new policy. Open Access and this new policy are complicated topics that simply can't be covered in a single blog post.

Public Access Week: New NIH Public Access Policy starts Today

Last week I wrote about web-based writing tools. I believe that these tools are

 
 almost
 

there and someone has to put the pieces together to make them work for writing a scientific paper. EJ Press System by EJournal Press, Manuscript Central by ScholarOne and Editiorial Manager by Aries Systems are among the most popular web-based online submission systems.

Could you write your next paper within the manuscript submission system?

Since last year this blog is powered by the Ghost open source blogging platform. Two important and long-standing shortcomings of the platform were search and comments, which I added via integrating third-party tools (Typesense and Discourse, respectively). In the last several weeks Ghost team has worked hard to add these features to the core platform, described here and here.

Now with native comments

The Research Data Alliance 6th Plenary last week discussed numerous topics very relevant to DataCite. Below is a short subjective list of topics I found interesting. If you attended RDA, feel free to add your thoughts in the comments.

Thoughts on the Research Data Alliance 6th Plenary

CSV in many ways is for data what Markdown is for text documents: a very simple format that is both human- and machine-readable, and that – despite a number of shortcomings - is widely used. Given the popularity of Markdown for writing blog posts, using CSV to publish blog posts with tabular data should be an obvious thing to do, and we have just published our first blog post using CSV data.