We are excited to announce a paper describing rotl, our package for theOpen Tree of Life data, has beenpublished. The fullcitation is: Michonneau, F., Brown, J. W. and Winter, D. J. (2016), rotl: an Rpackage to interact with the Open Tree of Life data. Methods EcolEvol. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.12593 The paper, which is freely available, describes the package and the datait wraps in detail.

My short note on "Wikipedia as an Encyclopaedia of Life" has appeared in Organisms Diversity &

To much fanfare (e.g., Nature News , "Linnaeus meets the Internet" doi:10.1038/news.2010.221), on May 5th PLoS ONE published Sandy Knapp's "Four New Vining Species of Solanum (Dulcamaroid Clade) from Montane Habitats in Tropical America" doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010502.

At long last the peer-reviewed version of the paper "Enhanced display of scientific articles using extended metadata" (doi:10.1016/j.websem.2010.03.004), in which I describe my entry in the Elsevier Grand Challenge, has finally appeared in the journal Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web . The pre-print version of this paper has been online (hdl:10101/npre.2009.3173.1) for a year prior to appearance of the

This morning I posted this tweet: My grumpiness (on this occasion, seems lots of things seem to make me grumpy lately) is that often journal RSS feeds leave a lot to be desired. As RSS feeds are a major source of biodiversity information (for a great example of their use see uBio's RSS, described in doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm109) it would be helpful if publishers did a few basic things.

There are a set of memes that seem to be popping up with increasing regularity in the last few weeks. The first is that more of the outputs of scientific research need to be published. Sometimes this means the publication of negative results, other times it might mean that a community doesn’t feel they have an outlet for their particular research field. The traditional response to this is “we need a journal” for this.

Following on from Science Online 09 and particularly discussions on Impact Factors and researcher incentives (also on Friendfeed and some video available at Mogulus via video on demand) as well as the article in PloS Computational Biology by Phil Bourne and Lynn Fink the issue of unique researcher identifiers has really emerged as absolutely central to making traditional publication work better,

Shameless plug. One of my former PhD students, Katie Davis, is second author on "Dinosaurs and the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution" (doi:10.1098/rspb.2008.0715), which came out recently in Proceedings of the Royal Society . The abstract: Now, if we could just get the bird supertree paper out the door...

My short note on the LSID Tester tool has been published in the Open Access journal Source Code for Biology and Medicine. The article has just come out so the DOI (doi:10.1186/1751-0473-3-2) isn't live yet, the direct link is http://www.scfbm.org/content/3/1/2/. Source code for the tester is available from Google Code.

My paper on mapping TreeBASE names to other databases is out as provisional PDF on the BMC Bioinformatics web site (doi:10.1186/1471-2105-8-158 -- not working yet). The abstract: The TBMap web site needs some work, it's really only intended to document the mapping. Once I've tweaked and updated the mapping, I hope to use it in my forthcoming all-sining, all-dancing, phylogeny database...