ResearchBlogging.org News

Portuguese-language posts now supported!

By Dave Munger | June 23, 2009

We're pleased to announce that ResearchBlogging.org now includes posts about peer-reviewed research in Portuguese. Portuguese is the fourth language supported by the site, which has supported German and English posts since August 2008, and Spanish posts since last month.

The site was designed with the flexibility to offer blog posts in any language, but the key to supporting a new language lies not in the software, but the humans behind it. Since most of the people blogging about peer-reviewed research are busy scientists themselves, it can be a challenge to locate qualified experts willing to help evaluate participating blogs to ensure that our standards are maintained, no matter the language of the blog post.

Fortunately, Portuguese-language bloggers Atila Iamarino, Luiz Bento, and Tatiana Nahas have volunteered their valuable time and expertise and will serve as the first Portuguese-language administrators of the site. These bloggers will lead the way in sharing their thoughts on peer-reviewed research, written in Portuguese.

Visitors to ResearchBlogging.org can specify which language or languages they prefer to read, and the site remembers their preferences from visit to visit. There are also RSS feeds available in each language, and Twitter users can follow posts in each language as well (Portuguese, Spanish, German, English).

Here are the first Portuguese-language blogs to register for the site.

Bala Mágica
Brontossauros em meu Jardim
Chapéu, Chicote e Carbono-14
ciência na mídia
De Rerum Natura
Discutindo Ecologia
Ecce Medicus
Em Síntese
Marco Evolutivo
Rainha Vermelha

We encourage new bloggers to register. If you blog about peer reviewed research in Portuguese (or English, Spanish, or German), visit our registration page to sign up. If you know a blogger in one of those languages, let them know about our site and encourage them to join. For more information in Portuguese visit Portuguese.ResearchBloggingLanguages.org.

ResearchBlogging.org helps people locate and share academic blog posts about peer-reviewed research, instead of just news reports and press releases. Bloggers use the ResearchBlogging.org icon to identify their thoughtful posts about serious research, and those posts are collected in a database and displayed on a central site for easy reference.

The hundreds of registered blogs publish dozens of posts about peer-reviewed research each day. That’s more content than the science section of any mainstream newspaper, and the posts collected are typically much longer and more detailed than a newspaper article. Even if you don’t have a blog, you can still use the site to learn about fascinating developments in cutting-edge research from around the world.

Topics: News | No Comments »

Pubget — useful, growing resource for anyone interested in research

By Dave Munger | June 10, 2009

We're really impressed by the service over at Pubget. It's a great search engine that solves one of the niggling problems we've all encountered: once you locate a citation, you still have to go find the actual paper. Their service allows users to go directly to the paper itself as soon as they find it. Currently 50 research institutions are using their service, giving them direct access to papers as soon as they are located, as long as their library has online access to the journal. If you're not associated with one of these institutions, you can still use their public search to find publicly available research.

ResearchBlogging.org will soon be working closely with Pubget to make it easier to access articles you see on our site, and easier to find blog posts about articles you find on their site. You'll hear more from us about this soon. In the meantime, go check out PubGet.

Here's more on Pubget from Ryan Jones, one of the site's founders:

About us: Pubget solves the problem of full-text research document access. As opposed to sites like PubMed® that provide results linking to papers, Pubget's results ARE the papers. We built Pubget because each year, scientists spend at least a quarter billion minutes searching for biomedical literature online. This is time they could better spend curing disease and building the future.

The Pubget service is free to the scientific community, and we include tools for building site widgets, bulk paper downloading and virtual storage and sharing. As such, we’ve attracted tens of thousands of scientists so far and are doubling in size every month. We're also now available to work with subscription holdings from Albert Einstein Medical Center to Yale (no 'Z' yet!).

Pubget FAQ
Who are these guys? Pubget was founded by experts in bioscience, web development and web search: Ramy, a clinical pathologist at Harvard; Ian, a senior architect from IBM; and Ryan, a former web search exec from Microsoft.

How do you make money? The base Pubget service is free to the scientific community. We make money by providing marketing services to the lab equipment and pharmaceutical industries (ads) and through premium services (coming soon!).

How do you get around copyrights? Pubget is not a way to get around copyrights. In fact, Pubget cannot give a user access to any PDF or other material to which the user does not already have legal access. For example, if the user does not have access to a research article in the journal Nature (either through an individual subscription or through the user's institution), Pubget will not be able to give that user the PDF. This is because technically, Pubget delivers only links to copyright-restricted content, not the content itself.

How are you affiliated with institutions, what does ‘institution activation’ mean? Pubget is working with librarians at dozens of research institutions around the world — you can see some of our relationships at the top of our homepage. Pubget can synchs with library journal holdings, enabling users to get full access to subscription PDFs through the Pubget service.

Topics: News | No Comments »

Coming soon: ResearchBlogging.org in Portuguese

By Dave Munger | June 3, 2009

Hot on the heels of our launch of ResearchBlogging.org in Spanish, we're now getting ready to support another language: Portuguese. Atila Iamarino has created a blog to collect the names and URLs of interested blogs. If you blog in Portuguese, or you know someone who does, send them to http://portuguese.researchblogginglanguages.org/, where they'll find Portuguese-language instructions and information about the new site.

We encourage bloggers to share links to their blogs and let us know if they are interested in helping to administer the site. Once we have assembled a critical mass of bloggers, we'll select administrators and start signing up Portuguese-language blogs here on ResearchBlogging.org.

In principle, there is no limit to the number of languages we can support on ResearchBlogging.org The key to starting any new language is people. We need someone like Atila to take initiative and set up a site to recruit bloggers and offer technical help, and we need bilingual administrators so that we can ensure that our standards are the same, no matter what language the blog is in. If you're interested in helping us start a new language, don't hesitate to contact us at admin@researchblogging.org, and we'll begin a discussion of how to proceed.

Topics: News | No Comments »

ResearchBlogging.org now supports Spanish-language posts

By Dave Munger | May 26, 2009

We're pleased to announce that ResearchBlogging.org now includes posts about peer-reviewed research in Spanish. Spanish is the third language supported by the site, which has supported German and English posts since August 2008.

Fortunately, Spanish-language bloggers Evaristo Rojas-Mayoral, along with César Tomé López and Efraín De Luna, have volunteered their valuable time and expertise and will serve as the first Spanish-language administrators of the site. Rojas-Mayoral got things started translating key guidelines and recruiting the first bloggers to participate. Now these bloggers will lead the way in sharing their thoughts on peer-reviewed research, written in Spanish.

Here are the first Spanish-language blogs to register for the site.

BioUnalm
Bosque Ciencia
Ciencia a Tutiplén
¡Cuánta Ciencia!
Experientia docet
Investigación GeoPaleoBiológica en Somosaguas (UCM)
Jehuite
Morfometría Geométrica
Nietos de Kraepelin/Kraepelin's grandchildren
Noticias de PMMV
Noticias sobre Filogenética
Octópodo
Psicoteca

We encourage new bloggers to register. If you blog about peer reviewed research in Spanish (or English or German), visit our registration page to sign up. If you know a blogger in one of those languages, let them know about our site and encourage them to join. For more information in Spanish visit Spanish.ResearchBloggingLanguages.org.

ResearchBlogging.org ahora ofrece entradas en español.

Nos complace anunciar que ResearchBlogging.org ahora incluye entradas en español acerca de investigación arbitrada. Español es el tercer lenguaje que se ofrece en el sitio, el cual ha ofrecido entradas en alemán e inglés desde agosto de 2008.

El sitio fue diseñado con la flexibilidad para ofrecer entradas en cualquier lenguaje, pero la clave para ofrecer un nuevo lenguaje no es el software, sino las personas detrás de él. Debido a que la mayoría de la gente que publica entradas acerca de investigación arbitrada son investigadores ocupados, puede ser difícil encontrar expertos calificados dispuestos a ayudar evaluando los blogs participantes para asegurar que nuestros estándares se mantengan, sin importar el lenguaje de la entrada.

Afortunadamente, Evaristo Rojas Mayoral, junto con César Tomé López y Efraín De Luna, quienes publican en blogs en español, han ofrecido su valioso tiempo y conocimientos para ser los primeros administradores de habla hispana del sitio. Rojas Mayoral dio los primeros pasos traduciendo directivas clave y reclutando a los primeros blogueros participantes. Ellos liderarán el camino para compartir sus reflexiones escritas en español, acerca de investigación arbitrada.

Los visitantes de ResearchBlogging.org pueden especificar el lenguaje o los lenguajes que prefieren leer, y el sitio recordará sus preferencias de visita a visita. También hay fuentes RSS disponibles en cada lenguaje, y los usuarios de Twitter pueden seguir las entradas en cada idioma (español, alemán e inglés).

Aquí están los primeros blogs en español registrados en el sitio.

Invitamos a que se registren blogueros nuevos. Si tu publicas entradas en español (o inglés o alemán) acerca de investigación arbitrada, visita nuestra página de registro para darte de alta. Si conoces algún bloguero que publique en uno de esos lenguajes, hazle saber que nuestro sitio lo invita a formar parte de la comunidad de ResearchBlogging.org. Para más información en español visita Spanish.ResearchBloggingLanguages.org.

ResearchBlogging.org ayuda a la gente a encontrar y compartir entradas académicas acerca de investigación arbitrada, en lugar de sólo reportes noticiosos y comunicados de prensa. Los blogueros usan el ícono de ResearchBlogging.org para identificar sus entradas bien pensadas acerca de investigación seria, y esas entradas son agregadas a una base de datos y mostradas en un sitio central para referirse fácilmente a ellas.

Los cientos de blogs registrados publican docenas de entradas acerca de investigación arbitrada cada día. Eso es más contenido que la sección de ciencia de cualquiera de los periódicos principales, y las entradas agregadas generalmente son mucho más largas y detalladas que un artículo de un periódico. Incluso si tú no tienes un blog, puedes usar el sitio para enterarte de desarrollos fascinantes en la investigación de punta alrededor del mundo.

Topics: News | No Comments »

Coming soon: ResearchBlogging.org in Espanol

By Dave Munger | May 19, 2009

For nine months, you've been able to read posts on ResearchBlogging.org in German and English. Soon, we will be launching support for Spanish. Evaristo Rojas-Mayoral has created a blog to collect the names and URLs of interested blogs. If you blog in Spanish, or you know someone who does, send them to http://spanish.researchblogginglanguages.org/, where they'll find Spanish-language instructions and information about the new site.

We encourage bloggers to share links to their blogs and let us know if they are interested in helping to administer the site. Once we have assembled a critical mass of bloggers, we'll select administrators and start signing up Spanish-language blogs here on ResearchBlogging.org.

In principle, there is no limit to the number of languages we can support on ResearchBlogging.org The key to starting any new language is people. We need someone like Evaristo to take initiative and set up a site to recruit bloggers and offer technical help, and we need bilingual administrators so that we can ensure that our standards are the same, no matter what language the blog is in. If you're interested in helping us start a new language, don't hesitate to contact us at admin@researchblogging.org, and we'll begin a discussion of how to proceed.

Topics: News, Administration | No Comments »

PLoS ONE Blog Post of the Month

By Dave Munger | April 1, 2009

This month PLoS ONE has unveiled an exciting new program. Every month they will highlight the best blog post written about one of the articles published in their journal. To enter, you just need to sign up for ResearchBlogging.org and write about peer-reviewed research on PLoS ONE while following our guidelines.

This month the winner is Ed Yong, whose blog Not Exactly Rocket Science is one of the most prolific blogs on ResearchBlogging.org:

I was blown away by the latest post by Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science (so much so I even e-mailed the link to my Mother):

Ballet postures have become more extreme over time

The blog post, which I hope that you will find time to go and read, as well as a very interesting discussion in the comment thread, describes the research from a recent PLoS ONE article A Dance to the Music of Time: Aesthetically-Relevant Changes in Body Posture in Performing Art

Congratulations, Ed! PLoS's Bora Zivkovic also had great things to say about the quality of posts on ResearchBlogging.org:

This is the first time I systematically read ONLY the posts aggregated on ResearchBlogging.org and the experience was overwhelming - all the posts are of extremely high quality, suggesting that this service is an excellent filter for the best of what science blogging has to offer. But such universally high standards also made it difficult for me to pick the winner for this month. Every one of the posts could have won and deservedly so.

So congratulations to all our bloggers for maintaining such exceptional standards. Let's make Bora's job this difficult every month!

Topics: News | 2 Comments »

Beyond “peer review”: Should our guidelines become more inclusive?

By Dave Munger | March 26, 2009

Scenario 1: A physicist working with laser supercooling equipment is able to cool rubidium atoms to the lowest-yet recorded temperature. She carefully describes her exciting results and posts the paper to arXiv, where she is a registered author in good standing.

For weeks, the blogosphere explains her results and discusses the implications of the findings. But it's three months before the experiment is actually formally published in a peer-reviewed journal, largely unaltered from the original paper she submitted to arXiv. No one bothers to blog about the published paper, which is therefore never mentioned on ResearchBlogging.org.

Scenario 2: A neuroscientist hypes a hastily-concocted brain-scan study of three people's reactions to Britney Spears' latest single. The "Britney neuron" is prominently covered on CNN, USA Today, and the Sun. Several bloggers link to the media accounts but offer no additional analysis, and a few bloggers make annoyed one-off posts about how the media overhypes this "science by press release." Six months later, the research is finally presented at a neuroscience conference, but it turns out that the "Britney neuron" is also activated by the music of Bach, Bruce Springsteen, and the Jonas Brothers. It's more of a "music region," really, and the research doesn't offer any new insight into how we perceive music. The work never makes it into a published journal.

In an ideal world, ResearchBlogging.org would include the blog posts about the supercooling, but not the ill-named Britney neuron. Our readers want to see the most thoughtful discussions of serious science, not celebrity-fueled media hype. But our current guidelines would reject both types of blog posts, since neither actually discusses peer-reviewed research. Although arXiv is a highly-respected resource among many of the disciplines that use it, it's not peer-reviewed in the traditional sense.

I mentioned the possibility of opening up ResearchBlogging.org to arXiv on Twitter, and the discussion quickly took hold on FriendFeed. Here are some highlights:

When I first saw your question I thought: if this was any other repository in any other discipline I would say No, but arXiv has heft and has earned the trust by the people in the disciplines that contribute there. - Bora Zivkovic

I think if you say yes to Arxiv you will struggle to say no to eg nature precedings. I appreciate that it is different but that is not down to a clear principle but a community feeling. Which makes it very hard to base a rule on - Cameron Neylon

ResearchBlogging has the potential to become something like a syndication service for science news .. by including pre-prints alongside peer-reviewed you would start to blur the boundaries. But why not create a different section for pre-prints that track ArXiv , Nature Precedings and any other relevant ones? Pedro Beltrao

There are some parts of arxiv that are worth including, and some that aren't, too. - Mr. Gunn

As I've said before, I think you really need to do this if you want participation from the physics community, particularly the theoretical high energy crowd. For them, posting to the arxiv is more or less equivalent to publication, and that's when the interesting discussion and debate occurs. By the time some of these papers appear in a journal, they're considered old news, and no longer worth talking about. - Chad Orzel

So there's some enthusiastic support, some concern about distinguishing preprints from peer-reviewed research, and some concern that our overall mission will be diluted.

If we did attempt to include preprints in some way, what would our guidelines look like? Here's what they say now about peer-review:

While there is no hard-and-fast definition of "peer-review," peer reviewed research should meet the following guidelines:

Reviewed by experts in field

Edited

Archived

Published with clearly stated publication standards

Viewed as trustworthy by experts in field

I don't think there's any way to change that definition to include things like arXiv and exclude "science by press release." We might be able to modify our first guideline, which says "The 'Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research' icons are to be used solely to denote individual blog posts about peer-reviewed research." We could say the icons were to be used to denote either posts about peer-reviewed research or research collected in an archive that meets the standards determined individually by discipline.

So, for example, physicists could decide that they accept research in arXiv, but biologists might decide not to accept research in Nature's preprint archive (or the quantitative biology papers found in arXiv, for that matter).

As Chad points out, if we don't address this problem in some way, we run the risk of never having substantial discussions about many disciplines on our site. I'm not thrilled about the idea of a separate icon / section for preprints -- I think that would just make the site more difficult to use and more confusing for readers. What do you think? Is it possible to modify our guidelines in a way that includes the good stuff but still excludes the stuff we don't like? Are there any other preprint archives that we might also want to include? Should we start slowly (perhaps just with physics and arXiv) and see how it works? Let us know in the comments -- or just continue discussing the matter over on FriendFeed.

Topics: Administration | 6 Comments »

Why is Research Blogging important?

By Dave Munger | March 20, 2009

We're constantly working to increase the profile of ResearchBlogging.org and the blogs we represent. We think it's critically important -- for scientists, for journals, for students, and for the lay readers.

To do that, one of the things we need to do is communicate our message to other organizations: Journals, libraries, news-gathering organizations, and potential funding sources. We have some ideas about why what we do matters, but we also want to know why it's important to you: Why do you think blogging about peer-reviewed research is important for science?

Please share your ideas with us in the comments.

Topics: Administration | 4 Comments »

A whole set of improvements to ResearchBlogging.org

By Dave Munger | March 16, 2009

We've added several enhancements to ResearchBlogging.org, many of them requested by a number of users. Most importantly, our citations now more closely match the most common citation formats used in science: APA and CSE citation style, with the authors' last name first, followed by first initials.

This is done automatically if you generate a citation by entering a DOI. If you enter your citations manually, make sure you enter the names last-name-first in order for this feature to work properly.

Other new features:

Bloggers can now disable (and then re-enable) their active posts
Administrators can modify time stamp date and time on any post (just ask us if you need this done)
Time stamp logic has been fixed to work in cases where our system can't read the time from the post. (And it no longer resets to 12 a.m. if you modify a post)
Blog and Blogger reports: We can now make mailing lists from our registration database to send user announcements (we'll use this feature sparingly for important announcements).
Send Email Notification To Bloggers When Blog Approved - system now sends an email to bloggers with newly activated blogs
Fix Formatting of Output RSS Feeds - addresses the formatting issues in the RSS feeds coming out of the site (spacing, images not displaying, quotes and special characters). Images are now visible on our RSS feeds.

We hope you'll appreciate these new features; if you have suggestions for additional features, feel free to let us know by commenting on this post or in the forums.

Topics: News | No Comments »

ResearchBlogging.org, Creative Commons, and AcaWiki

By Dave Munger | February 2, 2009

Many ResearchBlogging.org blogs use Creative Commons licenses to share their posts -- it's a great way to build a larger audience for your work. For most scholars and researchers, copyright can actually do more harm than good. Far from "protecting" their property, it can make it more difficult to get noticed. A researcher's salary doesn't come from selling the words she writes, it comes from a research institute or university. Pay raises and tenure aren't determined by selling copyrighted work; they are based on (uncompensated) peer-reviewed publications and from getting noticed by peers who award grants and write recommendations.

As long as your name is attached to your work, it can make more sense to distribute your work freely and widely rather than trying to sell it, since many people might never see your work if they had to pay for it. That's one of the principles behind Creative Commons, who offer several licenses for people to share their copyrighted work. You can label your blog posts with a Creative Commons license, and now you can tag your ResearchBlogging.org posts to indicate they're available to be shared in the manner you specify (with attribution, for noncommercial use, and so on).

One way for more people to see your work is to share it on sites like ResearchBlogging.org and a new site we like a lot: AcaWiki.org, now in the beta stage of development. AcaWiki seeks to organize summaries of peer-reviewed research so the lay public and other researchers can more easily sort through the thousands of journal papers published each month. They plan on using the Creative-Commons-tagged posts on ResearchBlogging.org to help fill their site. If you want your work to be considered for AcaWiki, just use the Creative Commons Attribution license and tag it with the Creative Commons tag when you create your citation on ResearchBlogging.org.

You can also add the tag to old posts without reimporting -- just log in and edit your posts, adding the tag to the posts that you've licensed under Creative Commons. And, of course, if you don't want to wait for their editors to find your post, you can always go directly to AcaWiki.org and enter your posts directly into their system.

Topics: News | 2 Comments »

« Previous Entries