Earlier this week Björn Brembs wrote in a blog post (What Is The Difference Between Text, Data And Code?): The post is about the importance of publication of data and software where currently the rewards are stacked disproportionately in favor of text publications . The intended audience is probably mainly other scientists (Björn is a neurobiologist) who are reluctant to publish data and/or code, but there is another interesting aspect
The Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) is a NISO standard that defines a set of XML elements and attributes for tagging journal articles. JATS is not only used for fulltext content at PubMed Central (and JATS has evolved from the NLM Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite originally developed for PubMed Central), but is also increasinly used by publishers.
A few weeks ago Kafkas et al. (2013) published a paper looking at current patterns of how datasets o biological databases are cited in research articles, based on an analysis of the full text Open Access articles available from Europe PMC. They identified data citations by: Accession numbers available in articles as publisher-supplied, structured content; Accession numbers identified in articles by text mining;
Markdown is a lightweight markup language, originally created by John Gruber for writing content for the web. Other popular lightweight markup languages are Textile and Mediawiki. Whereas Mediawiki markup is of course popular thanks to the ubiquitous Wikipedia, Markdown seems to have gained momentum among scholars.
tl;dr: So far, I can’t see any principal difference between our three kinds of intellectual output: software, data and texts. I admit I’m somewhat surprised that there appears to be a need to write this post in 2014. After all, this is not really the dawn of the digital age any more.
A couple of days ago I posted specifically about the data re-use session. I’m going to use this post to muse about the conference more generally. About SpotOn London 2012 It used to be called Science Online London – an informative, sensible and appropriate name. This year I hear (rumours) that it had to change name to SpotOn because Science AAAS or some other litigious entity was claiming brand identity infringement.