As a child I was very clear I wanted to be a scientist. I am not sure exactly where the idea came from. In part I blame Isaac Asimov but it must have been a combination of things. I can’t remember not having a clear idea of wanting to go into research.

One of the things I keep revisiting is the way we display scientific articles. Apart from Nature's excellent iPhone and iPad apps, most efforts to re-imagine how we display articles are little more than glorified PDF viewers (e.g., the PLoS iPad app). Part of the challenge is that if we make the article more interactive we immediately confront the problem of how to link to other content.

Doing some information research ahead of my imminent OKCon 2011, Berlin talk, it’s come to my attention that the Open Access journal PLoS ONE is actually an excellent journal to publish in, with respect to Impact Factor. In the Digital Age, journals are merely vessels in which we can publish our research.

My paper describing the mapping between NCBI and Wikipedia has been published in PLoS Currents: Tree of Life. You can see the paper here. It's only just gone live, so it's yet to get a PubMed Central number (one of the nice features of PLoS Currents is that the articles get archived in PMC). Publishing in PLoS Currents: Tree of Life was a pleasant experience. The Google Knol editing environment was easy to use, and the reviewing process quick.

I recently made the most difficult decision I’ve had to take thus far as a journal editor. That decision was ultimately to accept the paper; that probably doesn’t sound like a difficult decision until I explain that I made this decision despite a referee saying I should reject the paper with no opportunity for resubmission not once, but twice.

The PLoS Biodiversity Hub has launched today. There's a PLoS blog post explaining the background to the project, as well as a summary on the Hub itself: Readers of iPhylo may recall my account of one of the meetings involved in setting up this hub, in which I began to despair about the lack of readiness of biodiversity informatics to provide much of the information needed for projects such as hubs.

Continuing on from my previous post Viewing scientific articles on the iPad: towards a universal article reader, here are some brief notes on the PLoS iPad app that I've previously been critical of. There are two key things to note about this app. The first is that it uses the page turning metaphor. The article is displayed as a PDF, a page at a time, and the user swipes the page to turn it over.

I've just come back from a holiday in New Zealand, during which time I spent a morning chatting with Zhi-Qiang Zhang (@Zootaxa, editor of Zootaxa ) and Stephen Thorpe (stho002, a major contributor to Wikispecies). Fresh from playing with PLoS XML to explore ways of redisplaying articles (described in my commentary on the PLoS iPad app), I was extolling the virtues of the XML mark-up that underlies PLoS (and other Open Access journals,

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.

The context for this post is the PLos markup meeting held at the California Academy of Sciences over the weekend (many thanks to Brian Fisher for the invitation). PLoS are launching a "biodiversity hub" and were looking for ideas on how to implement this.