Partially Attended

On the 1st of April I had the pleasure of being invited to a digital strategy forum event hosted by the Wellcome Trust. People involved in digital and online projects from across a number of not for profit organisations gathered to hear some short talks about using, and contributing to, open source, agile project development and responsive design. Open Source development. Open Sourcing Wellcome Library Player – Tom Crane, Digirati agency The player can be embedded in other sites. ... (more)

Background. On Monday the 31st of March I attended the Cambridge PHP Meetup, the topic was BeHat testing. Johnathan Gough gave the talk. This is something we are getting started with in eLife. We have a few small tests in place, we have a few regressions on the site that we want to tackle, and we are looking to use it as a way of pinning down requirements from the company for new features that we want to roll out. ... (more)

I wrote a large post at the start of this year reviewing my climbing goals over previous years, and laying out my goals for 2014. A key modification for me in 2014 is changing to a strategy where I set goals quarterly, rather than yearly. Let’s review Q1. Goals for q1 2014 try at least 12 routes of 6c or harder I managed to try exactly 12 routes of 6c in the last 12 weeks, and my last try yielded success. ... (more)

Discussing Open Access http://discussingoa.wordpress.com/ I read through this piece by Rick Anderson. It’s a very good piece. It does an excellent job of articulating some of the challenges of subscription publishing and of various forms of open access publishing. I have a couple of relativly minor issues with it. The impression I got from reading it was that OA advocates are more shouty and incapable of a serious debate on the issue than advocates of a subscription model, and possibly those who pursue subscription models are more open minded. ... (more)

Yesterday I attended an interesting meeting to discuss how to improve the connection between clinical trial registration ids and publications. My raw notes from the meeting follow. This is being discussed as publication threads, but the idea discussed here stands apart from the kind of publication threads that the endcode project worked on. attendees ATTENDEES - organisations: eLife f1000 PLOS BMC Springer lancet BMJ crossref attendees - people Geoffrey Bilder, CrossRef, Director of Strategic Initiatives Rachael Lammey, CrossRef, Product Manager CrossMark Daniel Shanahan, BioMed Central, Associate Publisher Tim Stevenson, BioMed Central, Product Manager Deborah Kahn, BioMed Central, EVP Publishing Caroline Black, BioMed Central, Senior Publisher Katherine Barton, BMJ, Operations Manager Josie Breen, BMJ, Head of Editorial Production Isaac Jones, BMJ, Production Manager Ian Mulvany, eLife, Head of Technology Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, F1000, Outreach Director Karen Rowlett, F1000Research, Managing Editor Helene Faure, ISRCTN Database Manager Hannah Jones, The Lancet, Managing Editor Dan Lewsley, The Lancet, Head of Production Joseph Brown, PLoS, Senior Editorial Manager Volker Boeing, Springer, Director, Process and Content Management Mirjam Kessler, Springer, Bibliographic Metadata Manager ... (more)

For the last couple of years I have done an end of year review of my climbing over the previous year, and set myself some goals for the coming year. Rather than doing exactly the same thing this time, I thought it would be good to look back at several of these reviews over the past couple of years, look at the data on my climbing, and see if I could discover any insights. ... (more)

Last Thursday I attended the launch event for OverLeaf. The event was composed of a set of very short talks, followed by a good chance to chat to people. It was a pretty nice evening. Dr Bibiana Campos Seijo - MRSC - magazines publisher and editor of chemistry world. Science is changing, publising is changing, a lot of this is being driven by technology. There is information overlaod. Publishers need to try to provide solutions to these issues. ... (more)

I have posted this post as a comment on the thread over at software carpentry in answer to the question What do we teach about writing/publishing papers in a webby world? I ended up writing a bit more than I expected, so here are the main peices of advice: tl;dr: - use a reference management tool - try to find the fastest venue to publish in - try to publish in an OA journal ... (more)

Today I’m at the STM innovations seminar. The twitter tag for today is #ukinno. The program is online. I’m going to take a light approach to blogging today, I’ll probably hang out mostly on Twitter. ## 9.35 The Research Data Revolution, Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean for Research Data Management, Johns Hopkins University  Data has become a major topic of interest from all sectors of society with headlines such as “Data is the new oil” to assertions from McKinsey that data is the fourth factor of production. ... (more)

Just attended the STM brainstroming session. I’ll update these notes in due course, and fix spelling issues, but I wanted to get the post live first. Notes I’ll just mention the things that I found interesting. ## Round1 Science Gists get a mention, yay!! Google scholar library gets a mention. Visualising data as maps is mentioned, mentions that there are no standards Howard mentions much richer tagging in the article, and upfront semantic tagging. ... (more)