Highlighting some iPhone app features

Highlighting some iPhone app features

Hopefully if you’ve got an iPhone you’ve already had a chance to check out the new nature.com app, available now from an App Store near you. Some of the app’s features aren’t immediately obvious which is something we’re aiming to fix in later releases (we’re also working on a video walkthrough). In the meantime here are a couple of things I think are pretty cool: Saving for later and syncing to the desktop tap on an article, then on the “actions” button in the top right of the screen. Choose “save for later”. The article has now been saved to  … Read more

Nature Video presents…

(posted on behalf of Charlotte Stoddart) Two new Nature Videos have just gone online. First up, and my first solo video project, a film about Sci Foo 09. Here it is… If you enjoyed the film and would like to share it, you can embed it in your own blog by going to Nature Video’s YouTube Channel. Also just out, the trailer for our latest Lindau film series: Nobel Reactions. Every summer an extraordinary meeting between Nobel Laureates and young scientists takes place on Lindau Island in Germany. In 2009 it was the turn of the chemists and we were  … Read more

Lies, damned lies and download counts

Lies, damned lies and download counts

Shirley Wu posted on Friendfeed earlier about some of the things she’d overheard people saying about PLoS ONE papers. PLoS ONE Manging Ed Peter Binfield weighed in early to point out that the best way of combating misconceptions about the journal is to push out positive info and mentioned the journal’s article-level metrics program. Near the end of the (long) thread was this exchange: “You could try asking them exactly how many downloads their last paper in a ‘high impact’ journal got… – Peter Binfield Fair enough, but you know, I really don’t think they think about that. They think  … Read more

Igor – a Google Wave robot to manage your references

(Google Wave hasn’t been released yet but if you’re interested in working with the preview you can request a developer account on the sandbox here) Google Wave is a new open source project from Google that holds a lot of promise as a platform for scholarly communication. It’s a little bit like email but allows for collaborative document editing, versioning and real time conversation within groups – check out Cameron and Martin’s archives for more. Igor is a proof of concept Wave robot that allows Wave users to pull in citations from Pubmed or their libraries on Connotea and CiteULike  … Read more

Welcome to the Streamosphere

Welcome to the Streamosphere

Web publishing as a discipline has few tenets but I think release early, release often and don’t be afraid to fail are pretty sound. That was the philosophy behind Connotea when Timo and Ben Lund launched it in 2004 and it’s the spirit in which I’ve just put up an early version of Streamosphere.  Read more

Wolfram|Alpha has potential, but I can’t see scientists using it for a while yet

Wolfram|Alpha has potential, but I can't see scientists using it for a while yet

Wolfram|Alpha should have launched officially by the time you read this, though it has been live since Friday evening. The execution is slick. The different result visualizations are a great idea. It’s loaded up with cool widgets and APIs. Most of the time the servers don’t fall over (despite some glaring security holes). To quote FriendFeeder Iddo Friedberg it’s “a free, somewhat simple interface to Mathematica”. Free for personal, non-commercial use, anyway. If you’ve got any questions about the GDP of Singapore then wolframalpha.com is the place to go.  Read more