Last Tuesday Nucleic Acids Research published a nice paper describing the UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) database (McEntyre 2010). UKPMC was started in 2007, the enhanced version described in the paper was launched January 2010. In November 2009 I published an interview with Phil Vaughan, the senior author of the paper.
Today I posted a document that should help define a set of principles for scientific attribution. These principles will be presented and discussed at the National Science Foundation workshop Changing the Conduct of Science in the Information Age on November 12. Many people helped me with this document (Cameron Neylon in particular), and I welcome comments and suggestions.
My post last week about citation rates of mandated vs. self-selected Open Accessfulfills resulted in an interesting discussion thanks to some good arguments made by Stevan Harnad. One personal conclusion for me: mandates for self-archiving are not a good idea. I would very much prefer researchers to be highly motivated to self-archive thanks to a repository that both fulfills important functions and is fun to use.
PLoS ONE today published a paper very relevant to Open Access Week (which started today): Gargouri Y, Hajjem C, Larivière V, Gingras Y, Carr L, Brody T, Harnad S . Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLoS ONE . 2010;5(10):e13636+. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013636.
The ArXiv preprint archive for research articles in physics, mathematics, computer science and related disciplines was initiated by Paul Ginsparg in 1991. ArXiv enables the rapid dissemination of research articles prior to peer review, and it quickly became very successful in this.
Practically all papers in high-energy physics (> 90% since the late 1990s) are first published on the ArXiv preprint server. Several related disciplines also have a long ArXiv tradition.
The iPad was released six months ago, and we already have several reference managers available for the platform. Reading the PDF of a scientific paper on an iPad is a positive experience, and to me very different from reading the PDF on a regular computer.
This week PLoS Computational Biology published another helpful editorial in their 10 Simple Rules collection (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000941): Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia. I have very rarely edited Wikipedia articles myself, and I suspect this behavior is the rule and not the exception among science bloggers.
Dear Christian Specht, Thank you very much for your detailed response in The Scientist to our previous letter regarding citation mutations.
Dear Scientist, last week you published an interesting article by Christian Specht about Mutations of citations. Dr. Specht found more than 600 wrong citations for the paper by Laemmli (Laemmli 1970), which has been cited at least 88633 times according to Scopus. Laemmli UK . Cleavage of Structural Proteins during the Assembly of the Head of Bacteriophage T4.