Article-Level Metrics provide new ways to look at the impact of scholarly research. Two important concepts are a) to track metrics for individual scholarly articles instead of using numbers aggregated by journal, and b) to go beyond citations and also include usage stats and altmetrics. Article-Level Metrics is also doing something else: instead of tracking impact by year, it looks at usage, altmetrics and citations in real-time.

Cameron Neylon yesterday wrote a great blog post about appropriate business models for shared scholarly communications infrastructure. This is an area I have also been thinking about a lot recently, and in this post I want to add a technical perspective (and an announcement) to the discussion. DevOps is an important trend that brings software development and administration of IT infrastructure closer together.

Last week Philippe Desjardins-Prouly et al. published the article The case for open preprints in biology – naturally as a preprint on figshare (later also published as full paper). The article sees preprint servers as a great opportunity for open science, and discusses the status of preprints in the biological sciences. In this blog post I want to add some comments to the text.

Today the journal Nature has released a special on the Future of Publishing. It includes a lot of interesting reading, but I want to focus on the comment Beyond the Paper by Jason Priem.

Following up from my post last week, below is a suggested list of features that should be supported in documents written in scholarly markdown. Please provide feedback via the comments, or by editing the Wiki version I have set up here. Listed are features that go beyond the standard markdown syntax.

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.

Last week has been busy. I went to Berlin for the launch of the Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) service. ORCID allows researchers to obtain a persistent identifier that can be used to claim publications and other scholarly works.

The April issue of Nature Materials contains three articles that discuss marketing strategies for scientists. The Editorial (“The scientific marketplace”) introduces the topic and explains why scientists should consider marketing their work.

Altmetrics – tools to assess the impact of scholarly works based on alternative online measures such as bookmarks, links, blog posts, etc. –have become a regular topic in this blog. The altmetrics manifesto was published in October 2010, and in the last 18 months we have seen a number of interesting new altmetrics services, including the ScienceCard service that I started six months ago.

This was another week with a fair amount of spam in my email inbox. We all receive email spam on a regular basis and most of us have probably also received science spam: invitations to scientific conferences about topics we are not working on, invitations to submit articles to journals not covering your field, and information about lab supplies we never had asked for.