Metadata such as author, title, journal or persistent identifier are essential for scholarly documents, and some of us are spending a significant part of our time adding or fixing metadata. Unfortunately we sometimes don’t pay enough attention to the flow of metadata, i.e. we ignore already existing metadata, or reinvent the wheel in how we describe or store them. Storing metadata in text-based formats is usually straightforward.

One of the major challenges of writing a journal article is to keep track of versions - both the different versions you create as the document progresses, and to merge in the changes made by your collaborators. For most academics Microsoft Word is the default writing tool, and it is both very good and very bad in this.

A common feature of blogs written by scientists is a listing of all their publications. Publication lists are a great way to provide background information about your research. Publication lists should provide links to the fulltext versions of these publications, should be nicely formatted - e.g. using a common citation style such as APA - and should be easy to maintain.

Last week I attended the Transforming Scholarly Communication workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The main goal of the workshop was to come up with practical recommendations for the topics #resources #review #literature #media #recognition and #platforms: The workshop started with product demos (18 demos in a little over three hours!), we then spent two half days working in smaller groups on one of the six topics above.

Other blog posts often provide important background material for your own posts, and they are typically cited by inline links in the text. But sometimes we need more formal citations, e.g. when citing blog posts in a journal article or when providing a bibliography. But how do you properly cite a blog post?

One of the annoyances with bibliographies as we use them for scholarly papers is that is usually unclear why a particular paper was cited. It is often possible for readers to gather this information by looking at the citation in the context of the surrounding text, but this is very difficult to automate.

ePub is a great format for scholarly content, and there are a number of tools to create ePub files. But creating content is only half the story, at least as important is an easy mechanism for distribution. This is particularly true if your ePub files are not books, but shorter pieces of content: journal articles, blog posts or even output from your ongoing research.

The iPad owners among the PLoS BLOGs readers can use the free Flipboard application to read all the great content that is written by my fellow ploggers PLoGsters (as suggested by David Kroll). In Flipboard simply create a new section and then add content to it by following the @plosblogs Twitter account. There are of course many other ways Flipboard can be used to follow science blogs, e.g. by following the @researchblogs Twitter account.

Problem You want to distribute papers for a regular journal club in your department. Solution Create a group for your journal club in FriendFeed. You can create a either a private group, where only group member can read and post messages, or a public group that is open to everyone. Then invite all regular participants of your journal club to FriendFeed and make them join the group.

Problem You want to regularly go through the papers published in the most important journals in your research field. Solution Subscribe to the journal table of contents (TOC) RSS feed. Almost all journals now provide their TOC as RSS feed that is updated with every new issue. RSS is a standard web format used to publish frequently updated works.