Archive for November 2009
NextBio: Expertise of an author
Filter terms in NextBio offer a fast way to know the expertise of an author at a glance.
Tags size are proportional to relevance of keywords…
For e.g.:
http://www.nextbio.com/b/search/author/A%20Yonath
A. Yonath is one of the 3 latest Nobel (Chemistry) for mapping
the ribosome at the atomic level.
P.S.: NextBio clustering features are also used in ScienceDirect…
http://www.info.sciencedirect.com/using/searching-linking/nextbio/
Social Bookmarking
David Crotty already said that there are too many redundant services on Science 2.0… Indeed, look at this page where an article can be collected in different online services:
from left to right: CiteULike, Complore, Connotea, Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, Technorati, Twitter
Knol Vs Biomedical Journals
An interesting tentative from a Consultant to compare publishing in free wikis instead of peer-reviewed channels.
The article starts with te list of well-known issues of the traditional publishing system.
Traditional article publication in top rated peer reviewed biomedical journals suffers from low acceptance rates, high page and public view charges, long delays from submission to publication, variable citation impact, loss of copyright and negligible returns to authors. (…)
The second problem is the delay in publication in traditional journals, due to editorial and referee review, comments and changes. For an article dealing with fast moving incoming data and changes, it means that the article is outdated even before publication? (…)
Many biomedical journals have strict limitation on number of word count, Tables, figures, photos and references based on classification of articles. (…)
Editors of top 5 medical journals with high impact factor, aggressively court top pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to publish results of clinical trials of new drugs, known drugs in new indications and landmark or outcome trials (…) Almost all medical journals print Special Supplement Issues for a new drug or its new uses and indications. (…)
Biomedical journals with high Citation and Impact Factor charge authors over $1000 per page for publishing (…)
Then, the author advocates for Knol as a promising alternative:
“The launch of the Knol project offered an alternative test medium for instant publication” (…)
“Ability to instant knol publication helps establish priority for authors and their ideas” (…)
BUT the author concludes
“For me the knol project remains experimental and needs cleanup and improvements. I will continue to publish articles in traditional biomedical journals covering biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry“
Maggon, Krishan. Publishing in knol vs Biomedical Journals. Online: http://knol.google.com/k/publishing-in-knol-vs-biomedical-journals#Introduction
N.B.: according the platform, in several knols, over 30-50% of the readers are from the pharmaceutical/biotechnology industry. In this article, the author gives also a list of sources about plagiarism in Science
Scopus: 85% of users are satisfied
85% of 2,000 end-users, recently surveyed by Elsevier, are satisfied or very
satisfied with Scopus.
These are the “Top Five” reasons why users are satisfied with Scopus:
1. Broad and comprehensive coverage of journals and other publications
2. User-friendliness
3. Ability to refine searches and the search options
4. Speed of Scopus to get to information fast
5. Citation counts
http://info.scopus.com/docs/scopus_user_survey_report_09.pdf
Science 2.0: sources
A nice list of useful (obviously done by a Librarian!) sources to start a review on Science 2.0:
- WorldCat: List: Science 2.0 / Open Science: http://www.worldcat.org/profiles/PFAnderson/lists/651073
- FriendFeed: Science 2.0: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/science-2-0
- Delicious: Science 2.0: http://delicious.com/tag/science2.0
- CiteULike: Groups: Science 2.0 / Open Science: http://www.citeulike.org/group/9932/library
Source: Emerging Technologies Librarian: http://etechlib.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/science-20-getting-started/
Patents are under-used
“Why do scientists not use the vast technical information disclosed in patent literature?” asked a Patent attorney in the Biotech & Pharma Professionnals Network at Linked-In.
” (…) scientists do not explore the patent literature. The risk of reinventing the wheel is therefore very high, and many valuable man-hours are lost. About 80% of scientific technical information disclosed in patents is not disclosed elsewhere. (…) What can we do to change the perception that patent literature is not just legal documents?”
Amongst comments, ones suggested:
- lack of trainings during scientist’s education
- technical and legal jargon as a barrier
- doubts on the reliability (not peer-reviewed; too much information, like numerous formulations, to protect the perimeter
- disclosed information is minimal because of confidentiality risks
- freedom of information is very new on this field and there is not yet a medline-like database to cover the worlwide information
Librarians still have vital role in the web 2.0 era
“In the past months much has been written about the hyped Web 2.0. Evangelists have talked about applying this to almost everything published or diffused online. Many people expect scientists to be leaders of the Web 2.0 pack. Observing the behaviour of my end users, however, it is not yet clear to me whether this prophecy has been achieved. (…)
For a science organisation, therefore, it can be a temptation to be attracted by religious promises of Science 2.0 as a way that it might improve some of these processes“
Basset, Hervé. Librarians still have a vital role in the Web 2.0 era. Research Information, October/November 2009. Also online:
http://www.researchinformation.info/features/feature.php?feature_id=237
Journal Business Model
Knowledge Exchange, a danish agency, has published a briefing paper (12 p.) on Journal Business Model:
- “Toll-access” Versus “Open Access”
- Cost of publishing in both models
- The Market of Scholarly journals
- Academics Versus Commercial Publishers
http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=173
