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.
Flickr photo my stevec77.
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. Finally, there is a commentary (“One-click science marketing”) by me discussing strategies and tools that scientists can use to promote their work. The commentary also includes links to pages by Phil Bourne (SciVee), Jonathan Eisen (Mendeley), Rosie Redfield (blog), John Hawks (blog) and Cameron Neylon (personal webpage).
Scientists may feel uncomfortable about marketing their work, but we all are doing it already. We know that giving a presentation at a key meeting can be a boost for our career, and we know about the importance of maintaing an academic homepage listing our research interests and publications. And people reading this blog will understand that a science blog can be a powerful marketing tool.
Feel free to add your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.
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. ScienceCard has been a very interesting learning experience, because I not only had to write the software, but also think about my perspective on altmetrics. Some of my recent thoughts are listed below.
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. Although I’m of course aware that spam is now a fact of online life, I don’t quiet understand how this science spam works.
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.
The first five years Papers has been only available for Mac and iPhone/iPad, but this week mekentosj.com released a pre-release version for Windows. Papers for Windows is a collaboration with Scimatic Software, and a comparison of the Mac and Windows versions is here. A 30 day trial version is available for download from mekentosj.com.
figshare 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 figshare in September and last month relaunched a much improved version of the service. I asked Mark a few questions about figshare below. I also uploaded two datasetst to figshare and made them publicly available:
Earlier this week I wrote a guest post for the Impact of Social Sciences blog. In the post I talk about a recent paper correlating tweets and citations (also discussed on this blog). But the main argument I try to make is that tweets are a powerful filter for personalized scholarly content:
A few years from now the “personalized journal” will have replaced the traditional journal as the primary means to discover new scholarly papers with impact to our work.
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.
Important features include:
F1000 Research is a publishing program rather than a journal. The format for F1000 Research hasn’t been finalized, and F1000 welcomes comments at the blog or via the Twitter account.
My main question about F1000 Research: is this a preprint archive similar to ArXiv and Nature Precedings? I’m a big fan of preprint archives, and I think that – contrary to what most people think – they should work particularly well for clinical trial data.
Update (1/30/12): RetractionWatch and Nature News also cover this story.
Reading List
