There is a fairly scathing editorial in Nature [The new zoo. (2013). Nature, 503(7476), 311–312. doi:10.1038/503311b ] that reacts to a recent paper by Dubois et al.:To quote the editorial:Ouch! But Dubois et al.'s paper pretty much deserves this reaction - it's a reactionary rant that is breathtaking in it's lack of perspective.
A nice article by Brendan Borrell about the secret life of herpetologist Edward Taylor, and Rafe Brown's efforts to untangle his taxonomic legacy has appeared in Nature :Fascinating article, but as always I'm going to skip straight past the content and look at links. The article leads with Ptychozoon intermedium , the Philippine parachute gecko.
I'm a big fan of the work Nature publishing group is doing in experimenting with new methods of publishing, such as their iOS apps (which inspired me to "clone" their iPhone app) and the Encode app with the concept of "threads". But there's an aspect of the iPad app that puzzles me: Nature's app doesn't know that a linked article elsewhere in Nature is also available using the app.
The release of the ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of DNA Element) project has generated much discussion (see Fighting about ENCODE and junk). Perhaps perversely, I'm more interested in the way Nature has packaged the information than the debate about how much of our DNA is "junk." Nature has a website (http://www.nature.com/encode/) that demonstrates the use of "threads" to navigate through a set of papers.
One thing I'm increasingly conscious of is that I've a lot of demos and toy projects hanging around and the code for most of these isn't readily available. So, I plan to clean these up and put them in GitHub so others can explore the code, and reuse it if they see fit.First up is the code to create a HTML+Javascript clone of Nature's iPhone app, as described in an earlier post.There's a live version of the clone here here.
In previous articles I've looked at how various apps display scientific articles. The apps I looked at were:PLoS ReaderNaturePapersMendeleySo, where next? As Ian Mulvany noted in a comment on an earlier post, I haven't attempted to summarise the best user interface metaphors for navigation. Rather than try and do that in the abstract, I'd like to create some prototypes to play with various ideas.
There are a growing number of applications for viewing scientific articles coming out for the iPhone and iPad. I'm toying with extending the experiments described in an earlier post when I took the PLoS iPad app to task for being essentially a PDF page-turner, so I thought I should take a more detailed look at the currently available apps.
Nature precedings is pre-publication server launched by Nature a few months ago. To quote from the website: Unable to resist, I've uploaded three manuscripts previously languishing as "Technical Reports" on my old server. The three I uploaded now have bright shiny DOIs, which may take a little while to register with CrossRef.