Social media tools and academic publishing, a presentation by Alan Cann

The following video is a presentation by Alan J. Cann for Editing in the Digital World, 11th EASE General Assembly and Conference Tallinn, Estonia, 8-10 June 2012.

Abstract of the presentation as published in the conference programme:

Social media tools and academic publishing

Alan J. Cann, Internet Consulting Editor, Annals of Botany; Department of Biology, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

As publishing moves from print-focused (slow, inflexible, expensive) to content-focused (digital delivery, article-level metrics/discussion), there is an increasing need for publishers to communicate with their audiences in ‘adjacent spaces’ beyond the traditional medium of the journal or book. Social technologies will continue to evolve rapidly for the foreseeable future, so publishers need to acquire sufficient expertise to remain agile in this area in the face of future developments. I will describe the Annals of Botany low-cost online social media strategy, which is extending the reach of the journal to new audiences and new demographic groups. This includees blogs as distribution hubs for content via RSS, Twitter and Facebook, and emerging tools such as Flipboard which allow content discovery on new platforms such as tablet computers.

And here you have a link to the AoB Blog.

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Microbiology blogs: a list of 20 great blogs for microbe lovers

Bertalan Meskó (@Berci) has compiled a list of microbiology blogs that you may find useful: Microbiology in the Blogosphere.

Envious, I decided to make my own list of microbiology blogs. After checking my Google Reader, I came up with a collection of 20 great blogs. I know there are many more out there, so please feel free to add a comment and suggest any microbiology blogs that may be missing from my list.

So, here they come, in strict alphabetical order:

1 - Aetiology by Tara C. Smith (@aetiology): "Discussing causes, origins, evolution, and implications of disease and other phenomena."



2 - Bactérioblog [in French] by Benjamin (@bacterioblog):"Le blog des bactéries et de l'évolution".



3 - BacterioFiles by Jesse Noar (@BacterioFiles): "The podcast for microbe lovers: reporting on exciting news about bacteria, archaea, and sometimes even eukaryotic microbes and viruses".



4 - Cornell Mushroom Blog by a collective of faculty, staff and students from Cornell University: "Even in the fullness of their horrific evilness, fungi are cool. That’s what we’re all about here."



5 - Curiosidades de la Microbiología [in Spanish] by Manuel Sánchez (@Manuel_SanchezA) (no relation!): "Este blog está dedicado a la Microbiología pero en general cualquier tema científico de interés tambien puede aparecer".



6 - Life of a Lab Rat ("occasional insights into the life of a lab rat") and Lab Rat ("Exploring the life and times of bacteria") by S. E. Gould (@labratting).



7 - Memoirs of a Defective Brain by The Defective Brain: "Science as told by malfunctioning neurones. A blog of Life, labs and bacteria."



8 - Microbichitos [in Spanish] by Miguel Vicente: "Los microbios no los vemos, pero sus efectos, para bien o para mal nos afectan a diario." Previously, Miguel used to blog at Esos pequeños bichitos.



9 - MicrobiologyBytes by Alan Cann (@MicroBytes): "The latest news about microbiology".



10 - MIKROB(io)LOG [in Slovenian] by Franc Nekrep (@fvnek): "srečevali se bomo mikrobiologi: študenti, učitelji, kolegi iz stroke pa seveda VSI LJUDJE DOBRE VOLJE..."



11 - MycoRant by Philip McIntosh (@MycoRant): "Philip has been writing, researching, publishing and doing other things in the realm of fungi since 1993".



12 - Mystery Rays from Outer Space by Ian York (@iayork): "This blog is intended to be a place for commentary on immunology, virology, and random other stuff that catches my eye."



13 - Skeptic Wonder ("protists, memes and random musings") and The Ocelloid ("Through the eye of a microbe") by Psi Wavefunction (@PsiWavefunction).



14 - Small Things Considered by Elio Schaechter, Merry Youle and collaborators: "The purpose of this blog is to share my appreciation for the width and depth of the microbial activities on this planet".



15 - The Artful Amoeba by Jennifer Frazer (@JenniferFrazer): "a blog about the weird wonderfulness of life on Earth". Older posts can be found here.



16 - The Febrile Muse by CMDoran (@TheFebrileMuse): "Portrayal of Infectious Diseases in Literature and the Arts".



17 - The Gene Gym by Jim Caryl (@mentalindigest): "Bad bugs, drugs and antibiotic resistance, all in a day's work at The Gene Gym, brought to you from the gym floor by a researcher (fitness instructor) in bacterial evolution".



18 - The Tree of Life by Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics), "evolutionary biologist, microbiologist and genomics researcher, Open Access and Open Science advocate".



19 - ViroBlogy by Ed Rybicki (@edrybicki): "Up-to-date Virology-related posts, mainly for students at the University of Cape Town".



20 - Virology blog by Vincent Racaniello (@profvrr): "about viruses and viral disease".




Note: I don't speak French or Slovenian, but that's what Google Translate is for, isn't it?

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Live webcast & Twitter: great combination for scientific conferences

As I mentioned in my previous post, thanks to the internet, I could peek into the meeting of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), recently held in California, from the comfort of my home at London, UK. This was possible because some of the meeting attendees posted comments on Twitter, in real time, and also because the meeting organizers made a live video broadcast available to everyone through the internet (that is, a webcast).


The webcast, called ASM Live, consisted of nine interviews to researchers on their latest findings. The interviews were very aptly handled by Jeff Fox, Features Editor for Microbe Magazine (a freely available, monthly magazine published by the ASM). Moreover, viewers were allowed to submit questions to the researchers by either using the online chat (provided by UStream) or tweeting to @MicrobeWorld.

Two of the most popular interviews seemed to be The Gulf oil spill: microbes to the rescue? and The first synthetic genome: what does this mean for microbiology, and for everybody else?? [note that there were two question marks in the original title, and this is not necessarily a typo :) ]


All the interviews were really interesting -- and you can still watch them: they are archived at MicrobeWorld (an online community for sharing multimedia resources related to microbiology) and UStream.tv (the live interactive broadcast platform that was used for the ASM webcast).


My sincere congratulations to everybody involved in the making and broadcasting of the interviews, that was a great piece of work!


And now, let's focus on Twitter.


About 1,200 messages containing the #asmgm hashtag were posted to Twitter in relation to the ASM meeting. There were all kinds of messages, and many of them were informative, insightful, or funny. Some of them included links to interesting articles or websites, while others redirected to photos captured during the meeting. I mentioned a couple of popular tweets in a previous blog post, and I'm including here a few more as illustrations.


However, if you search for the #asmgm hashtag on Twitter, you will only get recent messages posted during the last 7-10 days -- which is really disappointing.

Luckily, Alan Wolf had the brilliant idea of creating an archive for #asmgm tweets on Twapper Keeper. The archive is freely available online, so anybody can read and download all the messages.


In addition to archiving, there are other ways of reading 'old' Twitter messages: for instance, I find Topsy quite useful. However, archiving seems a very sensible idea to me -- especially for scientific conferences.

[Note: Twapper Keeper can only reach back as far as Twitter allows, so the archive needs to be started as soon as possible (ideally a few days before the conference, to include any pre-meeting tweets)]

Once the ASM meeting was over, I thought that a word cloud, as a visual representation of 'hot topics' (the most tweeted), could be a nice illustration for a blog post. So, I searched the internet looking for a suitable, user-friendly online tool that would generate -- automagically -- the perfect word cloud for me. But I did not find it.

After a trial-and-error process, I finally made a nice-looking cloud (which was featured image of the week at MicrobeWorld) using Wordle, but the result wasn't exactly what I had in mind:


Why wasn't I fully satisfied with my cloud? Firstly, because I had to do a lot of manual editing of the tweets: removing highly repetitive terms (such as "#asmgm", "RT"), fixing typos, stemming (a little), putting some words together to create meaningful tags (e.g. "San-Diego")... Also, the cloud was colourful and nice-looking, but the words were not individually hyperlinked (as in most tag clouds, see for instance the cloud located at the upper right side of my blog).

[Note: a tweetup is a meeting of two or more people who know each other through Twitter]

There are some online tools to generate tag clouds from Twitter messages. For instance, Tweetcloud seems to get quite close to what I have in mind. It indeed generates a tag cloud for a specific keyword (or user). But it seems to be limited by the Twitter search function (it only uses messages posted in the last 7-10 days). So, I guess I could have used this tool the day after the ASM meeting to create a cloud... but I didn't known about Tweetcloud at the time. Still, the cloud is not customizable at all.


So, I want to finish this post summarizing the characteristics of what I think would be an ideal tool to create word clouds from Twitter messages:

A) General

• Freely available, online tool.


• It could make a cloud for a hashtag, a word, a term composed of several words, or a Twitter user.

B) Searching Twitter

• It wouldn't be limited by the 7-10 days boundary of the present search function of Twitter.


• It would provide options to define specific limits for time (e.g. "only tweets posted between two given dates") and number of tweets ("only the last 100 tweets").


• Options to exclude, or include, certain types of messages (replies, retweets, containing links, linking to images, linking to videos) or users ("exclude these users").

C) Creating the cloud

• Options to use only hashtags (similar to My Tweet Cloud), exclude particular words (common words, numbers), use only particular types of words (e.g. nouns?).


• Stemming.


• It would detect possible typos, showing a list of candidates to be fixed. The user would decide if they should be corrected or not.


• It would suggest possible tags composed of more than one word (e.g. "San" and "Diego" are always found together, do you want the tool to combine them into a single tag "San Diego"?). The user would decide.


• The tags in the cloud should be hyperlinked. That is, clicking on a term such as "San Diego" would redirect to a list of tweets that included such a term.
  

D) Customizing the aspect of the cloud

• Options to change the colour and relative orientation of tags, and the general aspect of the cloud (similar to Wordle).


• Options to create an animated cloud showing changes in time (or location, user, etc). For instance, several clouds could be generated for a hashtag for different days (similar to this example) and could be combined into a single animated cloud. The user would define the period used to create each 'sub-cloud' (e.g. every day, every 6 hours) and the number of clouds needed for a smooth animation.

Please leave your comments, ideas or suggestions on creating Twitter tag clouds, or on the use of live webcast and Twitter for scientific conferences.











Note added on June 23rd:
I just read a great article on this topic: Twitterpated: Using Social Media at Academic Conferences. I found it via Hacking the Academy, a book that was crowdsourced on Twitter in one week. It deals with online education, scholarly communication and much more.


Related links:

- Added July 3rd: How to create a PDF archive of hashtagged tweets by Andrew Spong, STweM. It describes a simple workflow for archiving conference tweets. Found via FriendFeed.

- Added August 15th: SfN the Meh by DrugMonkey. Advice to the Society for Neuroscience (and other scientific societies): how to use social media for your next conference.

- Added August 22nd: Tagxedo - Tag Cloud with Styles. Tagxedo turns any word set (texts, blogs, tweets) into a visually appealing tag cloud. The cloud can fit a predetermined shape or silhouette. Link found via Andrew Spong's FriendFeed.

- Added September 4, 2010: Summarizr is a service that creates "a brief summary of a Twapper Keeper tweet archive. It works for #hashtag archives, keyword archives and @person archives. Just enter a hashtag, keyword, Twitter account name or archive URL in the form". See Twitter usage at the ASM meeting, based on TwapperKeeper archive of hashtag #asmgm.

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Highlights from a scientific conference, observed via Twitter - #asmgm

Lots of conferences and meetings on science-related topics are held every year, all over the world. Many of them cover wide topics with potential to excite the curiosity of a great number of scientists and --more importantly-- common people. Sometimes, a few highlights of a conference are reported by the mass media, and that's good...

...but wouldn't it be even better if anybody could catch a glimpse of a particular conference, in real time? What about getting comments made by some of the attendees about a talk that is happening right now? And, what if the speaker could answer, in real time, a question asked by anybody from anywhere in the world?

Well, this is already happening, thanks to the internet!

In this blog post and an upcoming one, I'll describe some examples on how social media and other internet tools were used during a recent meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

If you keep reading, you might learn a couple of interesting things about microbes. I also hope that these blog posts may give us all some food for thought about possible, better uses of the internet (and, in particular, social media) for the communication of science.

I'll be waiting for your comments, so don't be shy, I'm learning here!


The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) is the largest life science membership organization in the world, with over 43,000 members (and more than one third of them, like myself, are located outside the United States). General meetings, held once a year, are huge events with over 10,000 attendees, and cover new research related to the biology of microbes.

The latest general meeting took place in San Diego (May 23-27), and I tried to follow the event as closely as possible through the internet. Good for me: many attendees shared their thoughts, in real time, using social media. Also, and I think this is praiseworthy, the ASM actively used a battery of social media channels, and broadcasted on the internet several live interviews with selected scientists. And all this internet activity was freely available to anyone.

During those days, I followed the messages that the ASM and the attendees posted on Twitter, the popular microblogging service. To do this, I didn't need to know who was attending the meeting -- I just searched for Twitter messages (a.k.a. tweets) containing the following tag (or hashtag) that was chosen beforehand by the organizers: #asmgm (abbreviation for "ASM general meeting"). In the simplest way, this can be done using the "search" function of Twitter, as you can see if you click here (but note that tweets older than a few days are not retrieved).

So, when somebody wanted to post a tweet related to the ASM meeting, they just added the #asmgm hashtag, as in this example:


The tweet was written by science writer Carl Zimmer, and was one of the most retweeted messages during the meeting. It referred to a talk entitled "The biochemistry of beer" being given at that precise moment by Charlie Bamforth, a professor from the University of California, Davis.

Other Twitter messages posted by meeting attendees were also retweeted many times. I wonder how far the #asmgm tweets reached, having in mind that some of the twitterers at the ASM meeting had many hundreds of Twitter followers (e.g. Carl Zimmer has over 18,000)... Is there a practical way to calculate the total audience that a single tweet has had during a certain period? I don't know -- but I'm pretty sure that the room where Charlie Bamforth gave his "beer talk" wasn't big enough to hold all the people who read his "mustache quote" on Twitter.


Another memorable quote from the ASM meeting was:


The quote was pronounced by Edward DeLong, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, during his talk "Evolution and ecology in microbial ecosystems: unity in diversity." On a later tweet, Zimmer wrote: "Clarification of previous tweet/koan: genomes are not fixed. They are ever-changing, swapping genes, shuffling segments, mutating,etc."


Finally, another tweet by Carl Zimmer summarised a general idea that is common knowledge among microbiologists (or so I like to think) but might sound like news to many other people:


I'm not sure where the quote came from, as there were many talks going on at the same time (the meeting program has 350 pages, and that's without abstracts!). But it's clear that most types of bacteria on Earth are harmless to us. I would even say that most microbes don't even know that we humans exist... It's only because of our hard-to-eradicate anthropocentrism that we feel that microbes exist only to make us sick (and to provide us with beer, of course!).


But this blog post is getting very long, so I'm interrupting it here. The story about the ASM meeting and social media continues in my next post.

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A Twitter view of the general meeting of the American Society for Microbiology - #asmgm

The above image is a word cloud generated from about 1200 tweets (that is, messages posted on the microblogging service Twitter). All these tweets are related to the general meeting of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), which was recently held in San Diego, California (May 23-27).

Please wait for my next blog post, where I'm going to tell you about a few things that could be learnt about microbes by following the ASM meeting on the internet -- no matter your physical location on Earth (and beyond?). Also, I'm going to explain how I made the word cloud -- I'm pretty sure there must be a better and easier way to do this, so I would certainly appreciate your feedback on my next post.

Note: unfortunately, the tags in the cloud are not hyperlinked. The image was generated using Wordle.

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Media for Science Forum: poor organization, disappointing use of social media

A science journalism congress was held last week in Madrid, Spain, under the name Media for Science Forum (MFSF). This was a European congress dealing "with strategic issues about science communication and science journalism and its social dimension." One of its specific objectives was declared to be: "Explore new trends in Science Communication due to the web 2.0".

Well, this sounded really exciting to me (and registration was free!), so I planned to attend the congress. Unfortunately, the organization rejected my application due to the huge amount of requests received.

So, I couldn't attend the meeting in Madrid --but I followed the events from my home at London, using the internet.

This post describes my personal experience of MFSF, including a few thoughts about the use of social media. You are more than welcome to add your comments at the end of the post.


March 18th

I first learnt about the upcoming Media for Science Forum (MFSF) through an announcement made on the SINC webpage (in Spanish). SINC (www.plataformasinc.es) is a news agency focused on scientific research done at Spanish institutions and research done by Spaniards at foreign institutions.

After visiting the MSFS official webpage, I filled and sent the online registration form the very same day. Registration was free but seats were limited: the organization would contact me in due time to accept or reject my application.

After registration, I was expecting to receive an email, automatically generated by the system, acknowledging my registration and providing some additional information --this seems a common procedure for online forms--, but this message did not arrive.

Anyway, I sent a tweet to inform my Twitter followers about the event, suggesting a possible hashtag. I also announced the conference on the Science Writers Facebook page.


April 4th

Over two weeks passed, but I didn't receive any email from the organization, and no new information was posted on the MFSF website. So I sent them an email including all my personal information and a link to my CV. I also explained them that I needed to know about the success or failure of my application in a short time, as I eventually had to make some arrangements for my trip London-Madrid.


April 6th

The MFSF organization forwarded me an email, which was supposed to be sent to me on March 18th (but I had not received). The message thanked me for the registration and informed that I'd be contacted again by the organization about the possible success of my application. When? "Soon." No more details were included.


April 7th

I received an email with the following request: "We have had problems in our system, and I have to ask you to reconfirm the dates that you are planning to attend the Forum".

The problem is that the email did not come from the congress organization but from a known Spanish travel agency. I checked the MFSF website (again) looking for some explanation or connection to this travel agency: I couldn't find anything. Anyway, I replied with the requested information: I planned to attend both days (12th and 13th May).


April 12th

MFSF started to use Twitter and Facebook!

I thought: "Great, they'll keep us informed about what's going on."

Oh, how wrong I was...


April 14th

New email from the travel agency, including a message from the MFSF organizers: they started a blog!

"Excellent, another channel to keep in touch with us! Now we'll get some news!" -- or so I thought.

I wasn't sure if that message meant that my application had been successful, so I requested some information about it. They replied immediately: "Nobody is receiving any confirmation. The organizers are still receiving applications, and they haven't made any decisions yet. We will inform you in due time" (my Spanish-to-English translation).


April 28th

During the previous days I had exchanged a few messages with other members of a LinkedIn group (Periodismo científico y divulgativo, which is Spanish for "Science journalism"), and learnt that nobody seemed to have received any confirmation regarding their MFSF application.

So I posted a message on the MFSF Facebook page, requesting information (to see my message there, you need to click on "Media for Science and others", as the default page only shows messages written by the organizers).

They never replied to my message on Facebook.


April 29th

Six weeks after my registration, and 13 days before the event, the MFSF organizers sent me an email: "Unfortunately your request to participate on the congress has been denied due to the huge amount of requests received."

You can imagine this didn't make me very happy.

Anyway, I still expected to know more about the MFSF talks and discussions through the internet, by making use of social media.


May 12th: first day of the congress

Early in the morning, I learnt from Twitter (actually, I think it was through this Topsy search) that the MFSF talks were going to be broadcasted through live web streaming.

Oh, wait, it appeared that only the opening talk was to be transmitted.

Note that I didn't get that information thanks to MFSF "Web 2.0" tools: their blog, Twitter and Facebook pages were all mute about this issue at the time (and even later).

The opening talk --the only one that was to be live streamed-- was untitled and in charge of the General Director of FECYT (Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology). This didn't sound very exciting to me. So, I forgot about MFSF for the rest of the day. My plan was to check the internet for related discussions on the following days.


May 13th: second and last day of the congress

At midday, I was surprised to know (through Twitter, but not MFSF Twitter) that the forum broadcast was still live!

Although with some interruptions in the service, they had been transmitting the whole thing!? Apparently, this was just an unplanned, happy idea. Well, I guess nobody had thought about this possibility before...???

Anyway, so I was able to watch the afternoon talks. These included brief descriptions of European scientific news services (such as AlphaGalileo), and the final conclusions (which were not such a thing but a list of general recommendations). Nice, but not incredibly useful.


Today, May 20th
Today I've been searching the internet, including Twitter, for reactions to MFSF (see links below). It seems that the congress was quite popular on Twitter: the hashtag #mfsf (not the one I suggested) became the second trending topic on Twitter in Spain. That's pretty good for a science journalism congress!

...Although it must be said that many tweets were messages of the lifecasting type ("On my way to Madrid...", "Having a beer in...", and the like), which in my opinion only contribute to the noise -- when they are tagged with a congress hashtag.

From what I can read on the internet, it seems that most people found the forum interesting -- too bad my application was rejected. On the negative side, MFSF was poorly planned, and failed to provide essential information to potential attendees and the general public.

In particular, their use of social media (blog, Facebook, Twitter) for updates and conversation was really disappointing -- and remember that one of their specific objectives was to "explore new trends in science communication due to the web 2.0". After the first hello message, MFSF published only 10 messages on Twitter and 13 updates on Facebook (numbers correct at the time of writing this) -- and all these messages were just announcements of new blog posts. No updates about registration issues, no announcements concerning the live web broadcasting, no comments on specific talks, no conversation at all. That is useless to me.


Reactions to MFSF:
- No hay que ser innovador... tan sólo parecerlo [in Spanish] by Javi Peláez. La aldea irreductible, May 12th, 2010.
- Media for Science Forum (1), (2) and (3) [in Catalan] by Miquel Duran. Edunomia, May 12-13-14, 2010.
- Media for Science Forum and (II) [in Catalan] by Pep Anton Vieta. Pepquímic, May 12-15, 2010.
- Media for Science Forum 2010 – ein Rückblick [in German] by Hans-Dieter Zimmermann. FHS eSociety Blog, May 18th, 2010.
- El estado del periodismo científico, en el Media For Science Forum de Madrid [in Spanish but with English introduction] by Pere Estupinyà. Knight Science Journalism Tracker, May 19th, 2010.

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Social media for microbiology education and research

Vincent Racaniello is a well-known Professor of Microbiology at Columbia University Medical Center, New York. As a complement to his research and his classes on virology, he successfully uses different social media tools (blogging, podcasting, microblogging) to spread the love for viruses -- I mean, to teach the public about viruses (the kind that make you sick... or not).

The following video is a recording of a great talk he gave at the Spring 2010 meeting of the Society for General Microbiology in Edinburgh, UK. In this presentation he explains -- in simple terms -- how he uses blogging, podcasting, and other social media tools for the popularization of virology.

I'm wondering if the talk could convince a few of the microbiologists in the audience to jump on the social media bandwagon...? Anyone?


The video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license, and can be watched also at BioCrowd or at Virology Blog.


Image credits: "Jump on the social media bandwagon" by Matt Hamm. Source: Flickr. Image used under an Attribution-Noncommercial Creative Commons license.

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Social media for scientists

The following slidecast (that is, a slideshow including audio) is an excellent presentation by Mary Canady and William Gunn on social media for scientists. Topics covered: LinkedIn, Twitter, social bookmarking (delicious, citeulike, Mendeley), FriendFeed, science blogs.

If you are a scientist and you think social media is completely useless for you as a researcher... well, you are wrong and must watch this!

Social Media for Scientists

View more OpenOffice presentations from Mary Canady.

(Found via Twitter)

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Microbiology on Twitter?

Just for fun, I searched Twitter using some microbial-related terms (not many, as the query cannot be more than 140 characters long!). I have added an RSS feed for this query to the side bar on this blog.

[Note (added on 15th Nov): I removed the RSS feed from the side bar -- the automated search was not very useful]

Is Twitter useful for scientists or for science educators? For some, it seems to be.

Will Twitter (or a similar tool) be of general use among scientists in a near future? Perhaps.

As a new user, I know very little about Twitter. But interesting things are happening there.

I just find difficult to make sense out of most of them...

But I´ll keep trying.

And you should, too.

On Twitter, I am TwistedBacteria (obvious). But, definitely, you should be following at least MicroBytes and MicrobeWorld.

I also created a Twibe (a group of Twitter users interested in a common topic) called Microbiology.

(Thanks so much to Alan Cann for introducing me to the Twitter universe!)

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EcoliHub: all together now

EcoliHub is a website sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, trying to bring together researchers interested in Escherichia coli with the most up-to-date information and data. From the EcoliHub site:

Sixty years of study have made Escherichia coli the most deeply understood organism at the molecular level. Much of what we know about cellular processes can be traced to fundamental discoveries in E. coli.
In spite of its great importance as a model organism, information about E. coli is distributed among many online resources. EcoliHub uses web services to make seamless bidirectional connections between E. coli resources, thereby enabling the full use of existing knowledge and supporting cutting-edge research into the molecular basis of life.

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Research Blogging

From now on, some of my posts (only those discussing peer-reviewed research) will be indexed by Research Blogging, a community-run non-profit organization. Their web site allows readers to find and share blog posts about peer-reviewed research. Additionally, I will edit the code of some of my previous posts, in order to adapt them to the indexing requirements. However, the content of the re-edited posts will remain the same (even with mistakes!).

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Science Linked: Bacteria

Antonio Marques, author of the blog Science in Review, has just presented the results of the Group Writing Project entitled Science Linked: BACTERIA. Here is the list with all the submissions:

• Adventures in Bacteria, at Brightest_Kidz


• Artificial Life has Been Created at Evolution


• Viruses versus Bacteria at Sciencebase


• Slowburn Treatment for Chronic Disease at Sciencebase


• The Froth of the Liquid Jade at Twisted Bacteria


• An Unfortunate Truth about Bioethanol (from Corn) at Chemistry for a Sustainable World


• Environmental Friendly Fuel: Cyanobacteria as Ethanol Producers at Science in Review

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A new web 2.0 for scientists

From a post at Science Blog:

"Scientists from Harvard and some other universities from different countries started a project, in which they try to establish a web 2.0 application for scientists. This platform would facilitate the communication between researchers and would increase the efficacy of the research work."

Learn more at Facebook for researchers: www.researchgate.com

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Bacterial sex: quarantined!

You might have noticed several feeds on the sidebar. One of them (Connotea: csrsanchez''s bookmarks) lists the last five references added to my Connotea library. Last Tuesday I added a new reference: Bacterial solutions to the problem of sex, from PLoS Biology. "The problem of sex" refers to the difficulties to find a fully satisfactory explanation to why sexual reproduction appeared and what its consequences were (from a scientific, evolutionary perspective). After a couple of days, I noticed that the reference did not come out on my sidebar, while later-added entries did. The explanation is that the sexy reference was quarantined by Connotea, due to the repeated use of the word "sex", I guess. This is not a complaint, I understand the use of automatic filters to avoid submission of inappropriate links (and, of course, Connotea has all the right to define "inappropriateness" in the use of its FREE service). Given that automatic filters may be widespread in academic sites and e-mail servers, I was just wondering how annoying the filters may be for anybody doing research in fields concerning anything sexual...

NOTE added on Sept. 27: After remodeling the sidebar, I've changed the feed name from "Connotea: csrsanchez''s bookmarks" to "My Connotea library".

NOTE added on Oct. 10: Problem fixed! (see comments).

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