Connotea to discontinue service

This is a guest post by Grace Baynes, Head of Corporate Communications, Nature Publishing Group. 

Connotea, NPG’s social bookmarking site, will be retired in 2013.

When we launched Connotea back in 2004, there were no social media tools for scientists, and social bookmarking was a fairly nascent service. Fast-forward to 2013, and scientists now have a wealth of choices for social bookmarking. We see science content bookmarked widely on Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit and other services, and shared on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. There are also multiple tools designed specifically for researchers and scientists, including ReadCube, CiteULike, and Papers. 

Labtiva, the company behind ReadCube, is a Digital Science portfolio company (NPG and Digital Science are both part of Macmillan Science and Education). ReadCube is a free service and offers easy to use and reliable storage, annotation and sharing tools for scientific documents.

Regular users will know that Connotea, like many social media services, has suffered growing problems with spam, and associated service outages.  This isn’t the level of service and reliability that we wish to provide for our users, and we have concluded that the research community is better served by dedicated social bookmarking services. We will be sad to see Connotea go, not least because it was Nature Publishing Group’s first social media experiment. We continue to experiment, to learn from experiments  and to develop new products and services. We hope to announce new services soon that will improve scientists’ workflow, and help them collaborate.

Connotea will retire on March 12, 2013. If you have an existing Connotea account, please export all your bookmarks before that date so that you can easily move them to an alternative bookmarking service. As migrating content from one application to another can be tricky, we have provided the Connotea Export Tool for you. The Tool should hopefully make things easier by helping you export all bookmarks safely and in a selection of two formats:

• HTML – if you’d like to import bookmarks into a browser, and
• RIS – if you prefer to import bookmarks into a reference management system.

You will be able to log in to Connotea Export Tool using your Connotea username and password. Once you have downloaded your HTML and/or RIS file and saved it on your computer, you should be able to quickly import your bookmarks following instructions of the browser and/or reference management system of your choice. We’re not recommending any specific browsers or bookmarking tools here as there are plenty of them available on the market and the export formats we have provided should be compatible with most.

We would like to thank all Connotea Users for your patience and continued support.