nodalpoint.org

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src = "http://www.bioinfo.co.nr"

I just discovered Connotea a social citations and remote reference management service from the Nature publishing group. "Think del.icio.us in a white coat" (again, via Danny Ayers's weblog). This is similar to CiteULike, which I posted previously. Apparently there is an undocumented API too, any of the Connotea developers reading this ? Details please :)

Update: After using the service, I discovered that you can not edit posts once you've made them. This is not so good, as I am used to reclassify posts (on del.icio.us) as I evolve my tagging system. While it is good that the RSS feeds are using RSS 1.0 (RDF), it is not so good that the items do not include author information. Citeulike provides both these features.

Three of the developers behind Nature's RSS feeds have written a paper clearly explaining the role of RSS in scientific publishing (via Danny Ayers). If you have heard about RSS and you haven't quite figured out what all the fuss is about, then I would highly recommend this paper. If you are already an RSS junky, subscribed to more feeds than you can read then I would also recommend it, as the authors describe their meta RSS aggregator and filter service Urchin. I am considering providing an Urchin service for nodalpoint, that is if people are interested ?

Regular readers may know of my fondness for The Scientist, an online science news publication with a lot of varied and insightful articles. To my dismay, I just discovered that it now requires non-free subscription. Has anyone ever tried to convince their library to subscribe to something? I don't imagine it's easy in these times when we're losing journals in vast swathes. The Scientist has been around for years and has been free as long as I remember - I can only assume they've become popular and decided to cash in on it. Be warned Scientist - the internet is full of quality free writing; unless you're exceptional, people will just go elsewhere.

Just dipping into the latest issue of The Scientist, I was drawn to this opinion article - Middle-Aged Scientists are Most Potent.

So, some sociologist has reached the stunning conclusion that our output, in terms of publications, rises gradually to a peak somewhere in mid-career and then declines. They also note that success requires establishment and people tend to become established over time and are therefore older. Wow!

My question to you middle-aged established scientists is: how do you feel about a system that supports those who are already established but makes life very hard for bright, enthusiastic younger scientists, to the point that they are so disillusioned with the entire process that they are forced to consider abandoning their chosen profession?