Academic Productivity

Looks like Elsevier experiments on how to present scientific papers are starting to get coverage  (on RWW no less).

The basic novelty here is real time search, but everything is peppered with other webby things like comments and AJAX.

The key features of the concept are here, and one can play with working prototypes. They are asking for feedback. I must say this is head and shoulders over reading a pdf on the screen. As highlights: (1) A figure that contains clickable areas so that it can be used as a navigation mechanism to directly access specific sub-sections of the results and figures, (2) references are clustered by sections of the paper they appeared in, and hot-linked.

However, it’s not clear if this kind of effort is just cosmetic or actually an important change. From the RWW article:

Some parts of the available prototypes are interesting but opinion in the scientific community seems split. Is this ground-breaking stuff or yesterday’s news repackaged by another industry threatened by the web? That depends on who you ask.

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We want anyone to be able to contribute to ap.com. One way to do this is to leave blog posts open (but with a review queue). We proposed this method here, but not many people seem to be making use of it.

Maybe writing a blog post is too time consuming, and the barrier of entry is too high. An easy solution is microblogging: services like twitter let you share a tiny bit of something interesting you found (with a link), and anyone following you will receive it.

The thing with microblogging is that it doesn’t take much effort to share. Many people (including me) thought it was silly at first, but now it’s mainstream.

Since twitter provides real-time search you can find what people talk about right now. If you want to monitor a special topic, chances are someone came up with a unique way of identify the topic. A spontaneous way of organizing information outside the ‘follows’ structure emerged: the hashtag. These are terms that start with #, example: #iranelection. We have set up #AcaProd for academicproductivity. If you have an idea, or read something outstanding that you would like to share with us, just tweet about it and add #AcaProd somewhere in the 140 characters. Your tweet then is easily found by anyone interested in the topic. We will display all tweets in our front page too.

I found myself sharing a lot of interesting stuff over twitter, and much more often than through a blog, so I have a good feeling about this.

Of course, you should keep sending ideas/suggestions/complaints using our email, blog@academicproductivity.com

This could be a blessing. There are occasions where you (or your organization) have a lot of content in word files that would be better off in some form of collaborative/searchable repository. Wikis are very handy in these cases. However, it takes quite a lot of footwork to reformat all tables, headings etc to wiki parlance. This plugin for openOffice takes care of it.

Some people have chosen a wiki for their scientific homepage (Dario posted a tutorial in How to run an invisible wiki). I have considered it myself, although I’m more inclined to use a wordpress blog (post on how to set it up to maximize google scholar’s chance of getting your pubs coming soon!). One of the advantages of a blog over a wiki is that one can use a very good WYSIWYYG tool, windows live writer. Unfortunately only for windows. Now, this advantage is gone: one could reasonably set up and update without having to ftp files around or use crappy editors that come built-in with most wikis.

Good news for FOSS and the entire industry, really. Thomson Reuters claim didn’t hold on court. In an ecosystem where all competitors are launching new creative features every day (Mendeley, Zotero, citeSmart, jabRef, etc), development of endNote seems glacial.

EndNote maker’s lawsuit over open-source Zotero dismissed – Ars Technica

If you are interested in scientific blogging and collaborative tools for research and happen to be in the UK this summer, here’s an event not to be missed:

Science Online London 2009 will explore the latest trends in science online. How is the Web affecting the work of researchers, science communicators, journalists, librarians, educators, students? What can you do to make the best use of the growing number of online tools?

The event is cohosted by Mendeley and Nature Network. More information available here:

• www.scienceonlinelondon.org
• twitter.com/soloconf