There is only a bunch of tickets left for one of the most exciting annual events in the area of ICT for science. Hosted by Mendeley, Nature and the British Library, the second edition of Science Online London (3-4 September 2010) promises to bring together hackers, academics, publishers and startups in the field of software/services for scientists to discuss “how the Web is changing the way we conduct, communicate, share, and evaluate research”. I will be attending and would love to meet other AcaProd readers there.
Knuth announces iTeX
Donald Knuth announced he would make an earthshaking announcement at TUG 2010. The breaking news is the plan to release the next-generation TeX engine. Read the comments and a brief summary of the announcement in perfect Stevenote style from Slashdot.
Share your views on Open Access
Project SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) is a two-year project, funded by the European Commission under FP7. The project is currently running a survey to understand the perception of Open Access publishing in the academic/research community. You can participate in the survey by following this link. Participants sharing their email address for further collaboration with the project automatically enter a prize draw for an Apple iPad.
Paperpile: A new kid on the block
The first public beta of Paperpile–the latest entry in the crowded arena of free reference management software–has been recently announced. As I write, a test version is available for Linux, but Mac and Windows versions should be released soon. From the screenshots gallery, it looks like Paperpile will feature a streamlined (although quite typical) 3-column interface, support for tags/labels as well as the standard Web import functionality from online bibliographic databases.

It will be interesting to see how this software compares with cross-platform biggies such as Mendeley or established tools for specific environments such as BibDesk or JabRef.

