CrossRef basics

this slide taken from the CrossRef Basics Webinar...


... is a good, simple explanation of why we deposit and what happens when we do.

Santa Run...

just a note to say that i'm running the Disability Snowsport UK - London Santa Run 2007 on 08/12/2007 to raise money for Disability Snowsport uk - The Skiers and Boarders Charity and would really welcome your support.

Please take a moment to sponsor me...
http://www.justgiving.com/matthewllewellin

or link from the widget in the sidebar...

360 Counter

related to that last post is this new software release from Serial Solutions: 360 Counter

KBART working group

yesterday I signed up to become a member of KBART (Knowledge Bases And Related Tools), a working group initiated by the UK Serials Group (UKSG) following its commission and publication of the report 'Link Resolvers and the Serials Supply Chain'.

the report found that a lack of awareness on the part of many publishers of the OpenURL's capabilities and requirements is impacting the quality and timeliness of data they provide to populate knowledge bases, and thus undermining the potential of this valuable technology.

the KBART working group, to be run in conjunction with the US National Information Standards Organisation (NISO), intends to develop guidelines and educational resources to improve the supply of data to providers of knowledge bases and related tools.

i joined as a 'monitoring' member, and the first meeting is during Online on 5 december. i'll report on this further after that.

helpful desktop additions

iwantsandy
email reminder service

connotea
free online reference management, but also useful for those articles you do want to save

del.icio.us
a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's

Read it Later (Firefox extension)
allows you to save pages of interest to read later. a 'staging area' for bookmarks

Google Browser Sync (Firefox extension)
continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions

Pearl Crescent Page Saver (Firefox extension)
capture images of web pages

comment on these and add some more!

linkouts

Nature Physics editorial - Elements of style: 3, 581 (2007) doi:10.1038/nphys724

Scientific American's 60 Second Science
... building on the success of Scientific American's daily podcast of the same name, 60 Second Science aims to be comprehensive in its coverage of big stories as well as a curator of the kind of need-to-know information that doesn't show up on other sites until we've reported it first.

arxiv.org's API
The goal of the API is to allow application developers access to all of the arXiv data, search and linking facilities with an easy-to-use programmatic interface.

Portico to preserve Springer titles - KnowledgeSpeak
Non-profit electronic archiving service provider Portico, US, has announced an agreement with STM publisher Springer, Germany, to preserve 824 titles from the latter’s online journals collection. Additional journals published with partner societies and other third parties will be incorporated into the agreement over time. With this inclusion, over 7,200 titles have now been entrusted to the Portico archive.

Major IT and BPO firms in race for Springer arm - KnowledgeSpeak
Major IT and BPO firms together with private equity players are reportedly in the race for Scientific Publishing Services (SPS). SPS, a leading premedia and typesetting services provider for STM publishers, is majority owned by scientific and specialist information publisher Springer Science + Business Media, Germany. According to sources, the SPS deal is estimated at around $100 million.

CrossRef annual meeting summary - presentations available

all now available here.

you should definitely check out the ones from Geoff Bilder, Edward Wates and (especially) Sally Morris...

author-reader freeware

pinched straight from the lost boy link roll, here are links to two interesting pieces of software, probably most useful to authors and readers...

Publish or Perish
Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents useful statistics

pubmed2wikipedia
Creates subject-area entries for Wikepedia from a set of selected PubMed articles

scopus update

from their news pages...

Amsterdam – November 07, 2007 – Scopus®, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality Web sources with smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research, today announced that it has added new features to further improve research productivity and support the researchers' workflow. The new features include the ability to search for and browse through relevant content derived from cited references, additional and flexible clustering categories in the "Refine Results" feature, the inclusion of pre-published journal articles across all subject areas - a first for any multidisciplinary abstract & citation database - and extension of the self-citation exclusion options within the Scopus Citation Tracker.

there's more information on how to take advantage here

I will certainly talk to them about establishing a feed for our FirstCite articles to take advantage of this

searchengine update

as it's a friday, here are a few of the more recent, old-ish and revamped sites for a wider variety of search results than plain old effective google...

tafiti: experimental search front-end from Microsoft; it uses both Microsoft Silverlight and Live Search

searchmash: Google's beta mashup

ask: you know ask.com - revamped (you've probably seen the ads)

miss dewey: the fun one

two new beta sites worth signing up for the private beta (currently) and keeping a track of...
[true knowledge]: 'a website where you can ask questions about any subject and get a direct response'
powerset: a transformative consumer search engine based on natural language processing

CrossRef annual meeting summary (cont.)

what i left out of that post were the new CrossRef projects in the pipeline...

ticTOCs: service for academics and researchers to find, display, store, combine and reuse tables of contents from multiple publishers in a personalisable web based environment

CrossCheck: cross-publisher plagiarism detection service

WebCite: (mentioned before) archiving system for webreferences

other things were:

the Web Deposit Form: allows you to enter metadata and register DOIs

DOI tester: via the member's area (un/pw reqd) to crawl/recrawl and test validity of DOIs deposited

CrossRef annual meeting summary

this has been my first opportunity to report on the CrossRef meeting that both Stuart and I attended last week. i'm not going to go into too much detail, but give you links to the important sites so you can read more if you want. it's unfortunately the case that CrossRef have not yet (to my knowledge) released the presentations to their website, but when they do, i'll update to link through to the excellent talk ("Quality and Trust in Scholarly Publishing") given right at the end of the day by Sally Morris, ALPSP's previous CEO.

Here's the meeting agenda, biographies and presentations - the latter of which will likely be where those presentations come live.

Alex Frost, sermo: a knowledge ecosystem for physicians

Richard Kidd, RSC, Project Prospect: i've mentioned this before (see tag)

Pritpal Tamber, F1000 Medicine: post-publication peer recommendation

Edward Wates, Wiley-Blackwell: Trustworthiness: Does the publisher have a role to play?
this is another slideset you should check out when it comes online, but here are some connected links...
Author's version vs. publisher's version: an analysis of the copy-editing function
Best Practice Guidelines on Publication Ethics: a Publisher's Perspective

The post-lunch, graveyard-shift was taken by Ben Goldacre, the Guardian's Bad Science columnist/blogger: an insightful and interesting view into the minds of the media and public perception of science.

anti-facebook apps

enemybook and snubster are a welcome refreshment to the glum on fb...

STIX fonts!

31 october was a big day, but i missed it (just)... anyway - the STIX fonts have gone live - check it out...
http://www.stixfonts.org/

Tim Ingoldsby let me have a sneak peek at the arrows alone in July... amazing.

this is just the beta mind... beta phase ends 15 december