Archive by category | Publishing

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

Andrew Savikas visits Nature

Last Thursday, Andrew Savikas, VP of Digital Initiatives at O’Reilly Media and ebook expert, paid us a visit. We had some very interesting conversations about the future direction of publishing, and Andrew delivered a great talk on the topic. He kindly provided a copy of his slides (16MB PDF). My (partial and impressionistic) notes are below.  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

“I am not a scientist, I am a number”

On Monday I was at the BioLINK Special Interest Group at the Intelligent Systems for Molecule Biology meeting in Stockholm. Amongst the many thought-provoking talks was one by Phil Bourne, he of the Protein Data Bank, SciVee and other goodies. Phil made a cogent plea for a system of unique identifiers for scientists.  Read more

Commenting on scientific articles (PLoS edition)

Commenting on scientific articles (PLoS edition)

I’ve been taking a look at the comments left on PLoS ONE from inception until August ‘08 (data courtesy ’https://www.scienceblogs.com/clock/2008/08/postpublication_peerreview_in.php’>Bora). Last week’s crowdsourcing paid off and all of the categorization work gone done really quickly – thank you if you participated! Pedro Beltrao and Lindsay Morgan were the random reward winners and will be receiving some magnificent Nature branded marketing crapola shortly.  Read more

Pre-prints and DOIs

We and our partners at the U.S National Cancer Institute recently had an article describing our Pathway Interaction Database accepted by Nucleic Acids Research. I’m not posting to puff that up: during the submission process, the NAR editors raised a couple of perfectly reasonable questions about preprints and unique identifiers.  Read more