The iTunes Store was opened by Apple in 2003 to sell digital music and other digital assets. Since 2009 music purchased in the iTunes store is free of Digital Rights Management (DRM). Apple became the largest music vendor worldwide in 2010, and by 2013 had sold 25 billion songs. Scholarly articles are distributed almost exclusively in digital form.

One of the challenges of collecting metrics for scholarly outputs is persistent identifiers. For journal articles the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) has become the de-facto standard, other popular identifiers are the pmid from PubMed, the identifiers used by Scopus and Web of Science, and the arxiv ID for ArXiV preprints. For other research outputs the picture is less clear.

In my last post I wrote about the importance of keeping things simple in scholarly publishing, today I want to go into more detail with one example: citations in scholarly documents. Citations are an essential part of scholarly documents, and they are summarized in the references section at the end of the article or book chapter. The problem is that not everything that is cited in a scholarly document ends up in the references list.

Doing scientific research is becoming increasingly complex, both in terms of the tools and technologies used, and in the collaboration across disciplines and locations that is increasingly commonplace. While the way we write up and publish research is of course also very different from 25 years ago, I would argue that our tools and services haven’t quite evolved at the same pace.

One of the important outcomes of the Markdown for Science workshop that took place in June 2013 was a decision on a name - Scholarly Markdown - and a brief definition: Markdown that supports the requirements of scientific texts Markdown as format that glues open scientific text resources together A reference implementation with documentation and tests A community In my eyes this is still a great definition.

Before all our content turned digital, we already used page numbers to describe a specific section of a book or longer document, with older manuscripts using the folio before that. Page numbers have transitioned to electronic books with readers such as the Kindle supporting them eventually.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. Yesterday 60 years ago the first volume of the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien was published.

In a post last week I talked about roads and stagecoaches, and how work on scholarly infrastructure can often be more important than building customer-facing apps. One important aspect of that infrastructure work is to not duplicate efforts. A good example is information (or metadata) about scholarly publications. I am the technical lead for the open source article-level metrics (ALM) software.

Literate programming is a methodology that combines a programming language with a documentation language, thereby making programs more robust, more portable, more easily maintained, and arguably more fun to write than programs that are written only in a high-level language. The main idea is to treat a program as a piece of literature, addressed to human beings rather than to a computer.

Earlier this week Björn Brembs wrote in a blog post (What Is The Difference Between Text, Data And Code?): The post is about the importance of publication of data and software where currently the rewards are stacked disproportionately in favor of text publications . The intended audience is probably mainly other scientists (Björn is a neurobiologist) who are reluctant to publish data and/or code, but there is another interesting aspect