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 your phone and you can read it offline. Just tap the “Saved” tab to see a list of your saved articles.
• It has also been synced to your account on the nature.com/mobileapps website. Go there and log in if you haven’t already, then click on the “Saved” tab just underneath the header.
• On the website you can export citations for the articles you’ve saved. This uses Connotea so can be slow sometimes (we’re working on this too).
• If you log on with the same account on a different iPhone (or Android device) your saved articles will follow you.

PubMed searches

• in the iPhone app tap on the Search tab.
• enter a search term in the search bar at the top of the screen.
• before hitting the Search button on the keyboard press the “pubmed” button that has appeared underneath the search bar.
• hit search – you should see results from PubMed that match your query.
• tap on a result to read the abstract and to visit the full text version via the link at the bottom of the page.
• on the search results page use the “save” button in the top right to save the search.
• now whenever any new abstracts are added to PubMed matching your saved search they’ll appear in the Recent Articles view mixed in with the content from Nature.

We’re improving both of these things in the next version of the app – right now the PubMed search doesn’t work well for articles without a DOI and the offline experience leaves something to be desired. 🙂 As before if you have any bug reports or feature requests just let us know.

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 your phone and you can read it offline. Just tap the “Saved” tab to see a list of your saved articles.
• It has also been synced to your account on the nature.com/mobileapps website. Go there and log in if you haven’t already, then click on the “Saved” tab just underneath the header.
• On the website you can export citations for the articles you’ve saved. This uses Connotea so can be slow sometimes (we’re working on this too).
• If you log on with the same account on a different iPhone (or Android device) your saved articles will follow you.

PubMed searches

• in the iPhone app tap on the Search tab.
• enter a search term in the search bar at the top of the screen.
• before hitting the Search button on the keyboard press the “pubmed” button that has appeared underneath the search bar.
• hit search – you should see results from PubMed that match your query.
• tap on a result to read the abstract and to visit the full text version via the link at the bottom of the page.
• on the search results page use the “save” button in the top right to save the search.
• now whenever any new abstracts are added to PubMed matching your saved search they’ll appear in the Recent Articles view mixed in with the content from Nature.

We’re improving both of these things in the next version of the app – right now the PubMed search doesn’t work well for articles without a DOI and the offline experience leaves something to be desired. 🙂 As before if you have any bug reports or feature requests just let us know.

redux version of this post: we have a new, free iPhone app. Check it out. 🙂

NPG has a couple of big mobile related announcements going out today.

The first is that we’ll be supporting EPUB, the open standard for ebook readers. DRM free EPUB versions of our articles will be available alongside HTML and PDF making it easy for readers to read content on a device of their choosing. Here’s an example (you may need to right click and ‘Save as…’). We’ll be rolling out EPUB links on newer articles in Nature journal first; look out for them over the next couple of months.

The second is that we’re releasing free mobile applications for the iPhone (the initial version of which is available right now from the App Store) and Android (coming later in the year). I’ve got a couple of posts about specific features in the iPhone app lined up for later this week.

The two announcements are related: when you read one of our articles in the iPhone app you’re actually looking at the EPUB version which is generated on the fly from our XML content store. If you want to geek out a bit further you may find this talk by NPG’s CTO Howard Ratner interesting.

I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished with EPUBs and the mobile app; we designed and built everything in-house, with the mobile apps coming out of our NY office and the EPUB support masterminded by devs in London. As publishers we’ve been surprised at how well scientific articles work on smartphones given the right context… hopefully you’ll find the app useful too.

On that note please do download the app and try it out if you’ve got an iPhone or iPod Touch (or an iPad). This is just the first version of the app and we know there’s already room for improvement (more content, customization and improvements to the way some types of article are rendered, for a start).

We’re actively looking for feedback, so send bugs, suggestions and feature requests to mobile@nature.com and I can guarantee we’ll see what we can do! 😉 On that note over the next few months while we catch bugs and work out what users want from mobile apps access to Nature journal and Nature News through the app will be completely free.

redux version of this post: we have a new, free iPhone app. Check it out. 🙂

NPG has a couple of big mobile related announcements going out today.

The first is that we’ll be supporting EPUB, the open standard for ebook readers. DRM free EPUB versions of our articles will be available alongside HTML and PDF making it easy for readers to read content on a device of their choosing. Here’s an example (you may need to right click and ‘Save as…’). We’ll be rolling out EPUB links on newer articles in Nature journal first; look out for them over the next couple of months.

The second is that we’re releasing free mobile applications for the iPhone (the initial version of which is available right now from the App Store) and Android (coming later in the year). I’ve got a couple of posts about specific features in the iPhone app lined up for later this week.

The two announcements are related: when you read one of our articles in the iPhone app you’re actually looking at the EPUB version which is generated on the fly from our XML content store. If you want to geek out a bit further you may find this talk by NPG’s CTO Howard Ratner interesting.

I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished with EPUBs and the mobile app; we designed and built everything in-house, with the mobile apps coming out of our NY office and the EPUB support masterminded by devs in London. As publishers we’ve been surprised at how well scientific articles work on smartphones given the right context… hopefully you’ll find the app useful too.

On that note please do download the app and try it out if you’ve got an iPhone or iPod Touch (or an iPad). This is just the first version of the app and we know there’s already room for improvement (more content, customization and improvements to the way some types of article are rendered, for a start).

We’re actively looking for feedback, so send bugs, suggestions and feature requests to mobile@nature.com and I can guarantee we’ll see what we can do! 😉 On that note over the next few months while we catch bugs and work out what users want from mobile apps access to Nature journal and Nature News through the app will be completely free.

(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 there to capture moments of this unique meeting of minds on film. The trailer introduces the Lindau Meetings and offers a taster of the films that follow: five short films on chemistry plus a special film feature on climate change. The films will be released one a week from 27 August. Watch them here, or subscribe to the series in iTunes (just search for ‘Nature Video’ in the iTunes store).

(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 there to capture moments of this unique meeting of minds on film. The trailer introduces the Lindau Meetings and offers a taster of the films that follow: five short films on chemistry plus a special film feature on climate change. The films will be released one a week from 27 August. Watch them here, or subscribe to the series in iTunes (just search for ‘Nature Video’ in the iTunes store).

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 “what will be in my CV?” and they think any journal that is somewhat competitive [includes other PLoS journals, BMC journals, etc] looks better than one that accepts anything that’s methodologically sound. Again, not my view, but perhaps one that is held by many. Do people list # of downloads on their CV for publications? – Shirley Wu

They dont, because they dont have the data. However, people do list if their paper was rated by F1000; or if BMC designated it a ‘highly accessed’ article. So I think they will start to say “this paper was downloaded 5000 times in the first 3 months which put it in the top x% of all PLoS ONE articles, the top y% of all PLoS articles, and the top z% of ALL articles” (when the rest of the world starts quoting this data) – Peter Binfield"

Do people here think that article downloads stats should be put on academic CVs? (serious question)

It feels wrong to me. IMHO encouraging anybody to take download statistics seriously as a measure of success / quality would be a mistake. Taken on their own they’re meaningless, surely – nice to know for the author, but meaningless. For them to be at all useful you’d have to supply a lot of context – as Peter suggests – though I don’t think the journal level “top 10% of papers in first three months” context he outlined would be enough either.

(just to be clear I don’t think Peter was necessarily saying that people should put only the download count on their CV – am using his comment above simply as a jumping off point for discussion)

A download counter can’t tell if the person visiting your paper is a grad student looking for a journal club paper, a researcher interested in your field or… somebody who typed in an obscure porn related search that turned up unconnected words in the abstract. A search bot. Somebody on Google Images looking for free clipart. Got a blog? Check your traffic stats. Journals get those crazy queries too, lots of them. Mainstream search engines are a major source of traffic for journals but not always for the reasons publishers might want.

As a publisher do you account for this and only record ‘good’ traffic? What if your competition don’t?

Institutions and ISPs transparently cache pages. If my lab mate and I both download your paper depending on the publisher’s stats package it might register as only one hit (from the university proxy server). Do you compensate for that somehow?

Am I going to be penalized if I host my papers on my homepage? In my institutional repository? Should I add all those counts up for my CV? Do I need to cite my sources?

Should I tell my mum to set my paper as her homepage (and to be sure to delete her cookies each morning)?

If Science spends $50m on SEO next year and hits on their article pages double will the articles in 2010 be twice as good as those in 2009?

As an author should I be repeating keywords in my title to get more Google traffic? Should I try to include a figure of Britney Spears?

If we stick to giving ‘top x percentage’ context then do we make concessions for smaller disciplines publishing in multidisciplinary journals? More people work and publish in genetics than in quantum physics. Even if every important person in your field downloads your paper they might be outnumbered by grad students from the three dozen groups working on Rab4A effectors that download the genetics paper next to yours in the TOC.

I’m not saying that download stats aren’t useful in aggregate or that authors don’t have a right to know how many hits their papers received but they’re so potentially misleading (& open to misinterpretation) that it doesn’t seem to me the type of metric we want to be bandying about as an impact factor replacement.

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 “what will be in my CV?” and they think any journal that is somewhat competitive [includes other PLoS journals, BMC journals, etc] looks better than one that accepts anything that’s methodologically sound. Again, not my view, but perhaps one that is held by many. Do people list # of downloads on their CV for publications? – Shirley Wu

They dont, because they dont have the data. However, people do list if their paper was rated by F1000; or if BMC designated it a ‘highly accessed’ article. So I think they will start to say “this paper was downloaded 5000 times in the first 3 months which put it in the top x% of all PLoS ONE articles, the top y% of all PLoS articles, and the top z% of ALL articles” (when the rest of the world starts quoting this data) – Peter Binfield"

Do people here think that article downloads stats should be put on academic CVs? (serious question)

It feels wrong to me. IMHO encouraging anybody to take download statistics seriously as a measure of success / quality would be a mistake. Taken on their own they’re meaningless, surely – nice to know for the author, but meaningless. For them to be at all useful you’d have to supply a lot of context – as Peter suggests – though I don’t think the journal level “top 10% of papers in first three months” context he outlined would be enough either.

(just to be clear I don’t think Peter was necessarily saying that people should put only the download count on their CV – am using his comment above simply as a jumping off point for discussion)

A download counter can’t tell if the person visiting your paper is a grad student looking for a journal club paper, a researcher interested in your field or… somebody who typed in an obscure porn related search that turned up unconnected words in the abstract. A search bot. Somebody on Google Images looking for free clipart. Got a blog? Check your traffic stats. Journals get those crazy queries too, lots of them. Mainstream search engines are a major source of traffic for journals but not always for the reasons publishers might want.

As a publisher do you account for this and only record ‘good’ traffic? What if your competition don’t?

Institutions and ISPs transparently cache pages. If my lab mate and I both download your paper depending on the publisher’s stats package it might register as only one hit (from the university proxy server). Do you compensate for that somehow?

Am I going to be penalized if I host my papers on my homepage? In my institutional repository? Should I add all those counts up for my CV? Do I need to cite my sources?

Should I tell my mum to set my paper as her homepage (and to be sure to delete her cookies each morning)?

If Science spends $50m on SEO next year and hits on their article pages double will the articles in 2010 be twice as good as those in 2009?

As an author should I be repeating keywords in my title to get more Google traffic? Should I try to include a figure of Britney Spears?

If we stick to giving ‘top x percentage’ context then do we make concessions for smaller disciplines publishing in multidisciplinary journals? More people work and publish in genetics than in quantum physics. Even if every important person in your field downloads your paper they might be outnumbered by grad students from the three dozen groups working on Rab4A effectors that download the genetics paper next to yours in the TOC.

I’m not saying that download stats aren’t useful in aggregate or that authors don’t have a right to know how many hits their papers received but they’re so potentially misleading (& open to misinterpretation) that it doesn’t seem to me the type of metric we want to be bandying about as an impact factor replacement.

(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 as they type.

To use it invite helpmeigor@appspot.com to join a wave.

Continue reading →

(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 as they type.

To use it invite helpmeigor@appspot.com to join a wave.

Continue reading →