David ("Paddy") Patterson, Jerry Cooper, Paul Kirk, Rich Pyle, and David Remsen have published an article in TREE entitled "Names are key to the big new biology" (doi:10.1016/j.tree.2010.09.004). The abstract states: Do we need names? Reading this (full disclosure, I was a reviewer) I can't wondering whether the assumption that names are key really needs to be challenged.

One of my hobby horses is the disservice taxonomic databases do their users by not linking to original scientific literature.

When I first launched BioStor (an article finding tool built on the top of the (Biodiversity heritage Library) I wanted people to be able to edit metadata and add references, but also minimise the chances that junk would get added. As a quick and dirty deterrent I used reCAPTCHA, so anybody adding a reference or editing the metadata had to pass a CAPTHCA before their edits were accepted.

Playing with @couchdb, starting to think of the Mendeley API as a read/write JSON store, and having a reader app built on that...less than a minute ago via Tweetie for Mac Roderic Page rdmpage It's slowly dawning on me that many of the ingredients for an alternative different way to browse scientific articles may already be in place.

In previous articles I've looked at how various apps display scientific articles. The apps I looked at were: PLoS Reader Nature Papers Mendeley So, where next? As Ian Mulvany noted in a comment on an earlier post, I haven't attempted to summarise the best user interface metaphors for navigation. Rather than try and do that in the abstract, I'd like to create some prototypes to play with various ideas.

Dario Taraborelli has released ReaderMeter, an elegant app built on top of the Mendeley API. You enter an author's name and it summarises that authorship's readership in Mendeley. The app provides some summary statistics (mine are shown below), and if you click on the horizontal bar corresponding to a paper, you can see a visualisation of who is reading your paper, including a nice map.

Previously I've looked at the Nature, PLoS, and Papers apps, now it's the turn of the Mendeley iPad app. As before, this isn't a review of the app as such, I'm more interested in documenting how the app interface works, with a view to discovering if there are consistent metaphors we can use for navigating bibliographic databases.

Paulo Nuin, not the biggest fan of Mendeley wrote a blog post entitled Mendeley is going to be open source, in which he wrote: Among the essays Paulo read is Jason Hoyt's post on the Mendeley blog: Dear researcher, which side of history will you be on?. In response to a question about open sourcing the Mendeley client, Jason replied: Despite the fact that open sourcing the desktop client is the second most requested feature for Mendeley, I

Following on from my earlier post about the Mendeley API, I've bundled up my code for OAuth access to the Mendeley API for anyone who's interested in playing with the API using PHP. You can browse the code on Google Code, or grab a tarball here.

After playing with the public API for Mendeley over the weekend (see Social citations: using Mendeley API to measure citation readership) I've had a quick play with the user specific part of the API.