Partially Attended

I’m starting to draft this post on the train on the commute to my new job at eLife. After almost two years I’ve taken the decision to move on from Mendeley. They were without doubt the two best and most challenging years of my career to date. Working in a start up is an amazing, frustrating, enlightening, energising and rewarding experience. No single post can do justice to that time, and each time in the past weeks that I have drafted this post in my head it has had a slightly different timbre, so take this for what it is, a reflection in a moment. ... (more)

The awesome Rod Page has a great post on utilising Mendeley as a bank for citation data. He recommends that projects such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library should build on top of the kind of infrastructure that we have already created at Mendeley. I’m a big fan of this as an idea, and indeed one of my goals for Mendeley is for us to create a system that makes it easier for others to build great tools for researchers. ... (more)

There are three bills up for consideration in the US Government which if passed will have a significant negative impact on academic research. These are the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the Protect IP Act (PIPA), and the Research Works Act (RWA). SOPA and PIPA will have a negative impact by putting censorship controls into the hands of the entertainment industry, and permitting legal process to affect the underlying architecture of the web. ... (more)

Well, it’s been a while since I wrote up my climbing goals for 2010, and I totally missed doing this for last year, so as we ease our way into 2012 it’s high time that I do the same again. The key goals for 2010 were: redpoint fr 7a boulder V5 trad E1 some trips to do some trad climbing Well, since then I achieved the following: onsight 6c+ indoors redpoint 6c outside boulder V4 a few HVS’s So, not quite breaking through to where I wanted to be, but there is a feeling of definite progress. ... (more)

Back in 2010 I was pointed at zanran, a search engine that looks for data in graphs. I’ve been playing around with some sample searches, and decided to try drowning deaths swimming pool. Incidentally all of the results that came back were figures for young children. I guess this is because that is the group where there is the most concern, and so there is more published data about this group. ... (more)

MathJax has come a long way since I last looked at it. There is now a CDN hosting the js files, which makes calling it really really easy. It’s being adopted by GiHub for their wiki engine. Using it with markdown can cause a few bumps, but there seems to be a bunch of ways around this: [mathjax in markdown][mim] using some mathjax configuration and custom css [amazing implimentation][ai] in a notetaking app [php, mathjax and wordpress][phpm] Writing a block of %%\LaTeX%% like this ... (more)

Going from a date to a unix time: >>> from datetime import date >>> from time import mktime >>> start = date(2011, 9, 26) >>> mktime(start.timetuple()) 1316991600.0 Going from a unix time to a date: >>> from time import strftime >>> from datetime import datetime >>> datetime.fromtimestamp(int("1284101485")).strftime('%Y-%m-%d%H:%M:%S') '2010-09-10 07:51:25' ... (more)

In my earlier post on Megajournals I hinted that I felt that there could be a future in which this business model provided sufficient funds to allow a publishing house like NPG to make it’s flagship journal Nature an open access journal. This topic came up late one evening at coasp and I ended up making a bet with Matias Piipari. I bet that within 10 years Nature would become a fully open access journal. ... (more)

Hindawi publishers is a really interesting outfit. They are an open access only publisher based in Egypt. They combing a fantastic use of technology with the ability to afford a large amount of human curation over the data that they use to streamline their publication and reviewing systems. One of their publishing vehicles is called the International Scholarly Research Network and at the recent coasp conference Paul Peters gave an overview of how their peer review system works, I think it’s genius. ... (more)

The idea of megajournals had not really formalised in my head before, but at the COASP meeting the talk was all about “Megajournals”. [PLoSOne][plosone] is the archetype for this kind of journal, and it had not really struck me before as a huge revolution in the publishing industry, but after listening to a couple of days worth of talks on the topic I’m convincible. Megajournals are so called because they are structured to be able to publish many more articles than has been the normal practice with traditional journals. ... (more)