Michael Nielsen asked me to answer some questions about practical approaches to Open Science. You can see my answers up on his blog.

Reference management is a frequent topic on this blog. The last few years we have seen both a large increase in the number of available tools, but also big changes in how we use reference management software. But for many of us the first reference management software was Endnote. I first used Endnote as a medical student in 1990 (Endnote Plus at that time, published by Niles Software), and I’m still a regular user.

Open Researcher and Contributor ID or ORCID is a community effort to standardize researcher identification. The initiative was first announced last December, and is supported by a growing number of publishers, scholarly societies and academic institutions.

Microblogging is blogging of short text messages, photos or other media and is best exemplified by Twitter . Twitter use has grown tremendously in 2009, and this also includes many scientists. ¹ FriendFeed is a another microblogging tool that not only allows sending of short text messages, but connects them together in groups and discussions threads similar to what you can do in online forums.

Nature Communications is a new journal that will launch in Spring 2010. The journal will publish papers in all areas of the physical, chemical and biological sciences and is open for submissions.

PubMed Central was launched in February 2000 by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a free digital archive of journal articles. Just as PubMed, PubMed Central covers research in the life sciences, but not other areas of research, e.g. engineering, physical sciences or astronomy.

Blogging is a great way to report from a scientific conference. This could be done either with regular blog posts written in the evening or after the conference, and/or live-blogging using tools such as Friendfeed or Twitter.

Euan Adie in June announced the Streamosphere service on the Nascent blog: Welcome to the Streamosphere. His simple explanation of what Streamosphere does: The Nascent blog post explains Streamosphere in more detail, in another post from July Euan talks about some updates to the service. I've asked Euan a few questions to learn more about Streamosphere.1. Can you explain what Streamosphere is and does?

At SciBar Camp Palo Alto last month, Peter Binfield from PLoS ONE gave a very interesting presentation on Article-level metrics from the PLoS perspective. Particularly interesting was his announcement that PLoS journals will provide usage data (HTML pageviews, PDF and XML downloads) for all their articles in September.

Most of us find, store and sometimes read scientific papers electronically. Although abstracts and full-text papers are usually available as web pages in HTML format, PDF is clearly the preferred format for storing and printing papers. But publishing scientific papers in electronic form obviously requires more than providing the content in HTML or PDF format.