Victor / Mendeley Team - Likes

laura

The Ultimate Rebuttal Letter - http://bytesizebio.net/index...

December 8 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

The Neurocritic, Victor / Mendeley Team, Björn Brembs and Noah Gray liked this

Cameron Neylon

Article-Level Metrics and the Evolution of Scientific Impact - http://www.citeulike.org/user...

November 17 from CiteULike: CameronNeylon's... - Comment - Like - Share

Bill Anderson, Bill Hooker, Anders Norgaard and 37 other people liked this

Article on ALMs by myself and Shirley Wu - Cameron Neylon

27 more comments

Terrific. Are we still maintaining that list of "outputs resulting from FriendFeed"? - Neil Saunders

I was planning on doing a demo of annotation at PLoS before the end of the year - perhaps this article would be a good candidate. As always, anyone willing to join is welcome. - Daniel Mietchen

@ Neil: It's at http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc... , and I have added the article as #25 (details missing). - Daniel Mietchen

i added a note once, but now it won't let me add any other notes :( I don't see a rule about one note per person. I should have held off for a good one. - Christina Pikas

I also just noticed that my "annotation" - provided the link to StackOverflow - shows up in the general discussion, where the title "Link" certainly is not helpful, and there is no way I can edit it. - Daniel Mietchen

maybe something is broken, my note appears in general comments but also in that portion of the text as a comment. maybe that's why I couldn't add other notes? - Christina Pikas

Not sure why you can't add more notes. Certainly been able to in the past. I see both notes where they are supposed to be I think. But they will also appear in the general comments as well I think. - Cameron Neylon

Great article! I really need to add some comments or notes, just to prove the authors' point :-) - Björn Brembs

BTW, when does PLoS finally get karma? I've been asking for proper 'show off' userprofiles for like ever :-) - Björn Brembs

As in PLoS Overflow? - Cameron Neylon

Cameron, et al. - What's the most useful thing I could do to nurture and support this renewed interest in article level metrics? (not from a competing data product point of view, but a let's get some good technologies out there with good visibility) - Mr. Gunn

@Cameron: Exactly! I even think having a profile where you can post a pic and see how many papers and comments were published, papers edited, etc.was the very first thing I asked for when I signed up :-) - Björn Brembs

But it needs to be federated across publishers... :-) - Cameron Neylon

if authors put in their 'customer' weight, this will go faster, so why not go syndicate :-) - Claudia Koltzenburg

I think I'll use this paper in my spring thesis class -- this is the main one where I discuss publishing models -- and maybe I'll demo Diigo with this as a class project next to an article that discusses IF. - Mickey Schafer

While we're on the subject of functionality wish lists, I would also like an embed functionality for PLoS papers. Collecting my publications together but don't want to duplicate copies and reduce googlejuice for the journal - at least not for the OA papers anyway... - Cameron Neylon

Whilst not a darts-player http://www.flickr.com/photos... , I think Cameron has hit the "triple-twenty" there :) - Graham Steel

BTW, why isn't there a way to register this thread with the article? Why are we posting here and not on the article? There's got to be a lesson to be learned from this :-) - Björn Brembs from iPhone

http://bullseyevaluation.com/yahoo_s... - Graham Steel

Done. See comment #4. - Graham Steel

Search results: http://topsy.com/s... from Topsy http://labs.topsy.com/about/ - Jim Till

I've included a link to this thread in a blog post: Article-level metrics getting attention http://ff.im/bGuNY - Jim Till

+1 Bjoern :-) another question along these lines would be: why does Cameron's intial FF message link to CiteULike and not to http://www.plosbiology.org/article..., or plainly doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000242 ? - Claudia Koltzenburg

Because that was the way I brought the link in. I think that that pointer is appropriate. It is a pointer to the fact that I bookmarked it. Other people linked to the paper directly. Perhaps the issue is that we accidentally aggregated around the "wrong" item to talk about the paper. I'm not sure this is a problem as long as the referral works - its a UI irritation not a problem with... more... - Cameron Neylon

well, not directly, maybe in this ff-thread we're just providing some material for what you say in your paragraph "Technical Solutions to Social Problems", namely: "approaches that gather information from processes that are already part of the typical research workflow are also much more likely to succeed." - even though ff may not be part of 'the typical research workflow' (yet?) - and... more... - Claudia Koltzenburg

That's true, and certainly conversation sparked by the paper. But how to capture that in a way that is useful further down the line might be tough... - Cameron Neylon

I am still wondering if we would not need at least one metric for each 'scientist type' as described in http://dx.doi.org/10... - joergkurtwegner

joergkurtwegner -I'm interested to see what tenurometer comes up with re: h-index correction factors for disciplines. - Mr. Gunn

Mr. Gunn

The Wired Campus - 'The Last.fm for Research Papers' Tops 100,000 Users - The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://chronicle.com/blogPos...

November 19 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

suze, OpenSci Info, Rafael Sidi and 2 other people liked this

Nice short writeup on Mendeley in the Chronicle. - Mr. Gunn from Bookmarklet

Mr. Gunn

I'm busy preparing to the stem cells meeting in Austin so I don't have time for the official post, but I would like to announce before any more time goes on that I've agreed to serve in a consulting role for Biodata http://twitter.com/biokm to advise them as they grow on things that are of interest to the community of life scientists.

November 11 - Comment - Like - Share

OpenSci Info, Victor / Mendeley Team, Bill Hooker and Anne Marie Cunningham liked this

I thought about this for some time, but it seems like it fits well alongside what I'm doing for Mendeley. My aim is to help two good companies become great. - Mr. Gunn

Björn Brembs

When even Impact Factors don't help any more - http://bjoern.brembs.net/news...

October 30 from bjoern.brembs.blog : a... - Comment - Like - Share

Claudia Koltzenburg, Jean-Claude Bradley, Graham Steel and 5 other people liked this

Some of us do actually know that IFs are crap. :) Nor are they what we uniquely rely on when considering cancellations. Cost-per-use is a big one, and I don't wonder that the heinously expensive journals fall down. Ask your library about document delivery for the articles you need. - D0r0th34

11 more comments

Document delivery is actually far inferior to the references wanted room here. I've kept a list of papers I need, because I thought it was a temporary glitch (I still sort of hope it is). I guess I need to post that list to the Refs Wanted room soon... - Björn Brembs

impact factor is way down on the list, but i'm surprised there would be a lapse in their cell subscription. maybe there's just a technical glitch - that happens all the time. - Christina Pikas

yup, also possible... I have heard mild-mannered librarians swear sulfurously about service outages - D0r0th34

FWIW, I talked to 5 librarians at Caltech recently and just got nods of agreement when I maligned the IF, and they even knew about the alternatives, h-index, eigenfactor, etc. - Mr. Gunn

Just got a response from our library: Cell access only after 12 months embargo and Neuron access was canceled in 2007. Apparently, we only had access through other, departmental channels and something happened there. Obviously, our university has never had regular access to these journals, how pathetic! - Björn Brembs

Do you know what Cell costs? There is patheticness here, but it's not at your library or your institution. - D0r0th34

What I recall from conversations involving our Med Library colleagues is that Cell Press titles are always under "separate arrangement" as opposed to grouped with the rest of Elsevier's titles when license negotiations are made. Typical of the large publishers to know which titles are their gems. - carolh

@D0r0th34: Subscription prices: see original post :-) The patheticness lies in the title "Excellence University" which our university likes to use a lot and then not having enough sense to fund the library to be able to afford the 'excellent' journals. - Björn Brembs

@D: no one knows what Cell costs! That's half the problem right there -- a different, secret deal for every different subscriber. - Bill Hooker

Bjorn, the problem has gotten so out of hand that "funding the library" is no longer the right answer. I'm all for library funding, but I'm *not* all for pouring yet more money into big-pig publishers. We have thirty years of evidence that do what you will, their prices will expand to mop up the budget available. - D0r0th34

@D: I so agree with you - I tried to hit two birds with the same stone: one was to mock the 'excellence' of our university, because the 'excellent' journals would be the last to go if the university actually were that excellent (hence the title). The other was that this just had to happen at some point, because of the hyperinflation (see graph). I'll update the post with something to make that clearer. - Björn Brembs

This month's SOAN is remarkably apropos: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters... - D0r0th34

Steve Koch to Steve's feed, Kochlab

Cameron visited our lab today! Here's a photo of Cameron discussing the tweezers with Anthony. I'm doing my best to suck my gut in.

October 27 - Comment - Like - Share

Kubke, Victor / Mendeley Team, Claudia Koltzenburg and 23 other people liked this

Was an awesome day. Thank you so much for traveling and spending time with us today, Cameron! I learned a lot about science and means for carrying out open science. I'm energized about what seems like a very nice future protein-DNA collaboration. And I'm also energized about trying to implement some of the LaBlog and Google wave things you demoed for us. - Steve Koch

24 more comments

I agree it was a great visit. I enjoyed showing you the version of the $100 spectrometer I'm working on and all the great conversation. I hope KochLab can start a collaboration with our friends across the pond. - Andy Maloney from iPhone

I think I'm going to put some nuggets of information from today onto this thread. Here is a link to the Neylon, Ward, Towrie, and Parker Tus-Ter single-molecule proposal (linked in Cameron's open notebook; see PDF at the bottom): http://blogs.chem.soton.ac.uk/sortase... I think that the system they are studying fits... more... - Steve Koch

I started learning more acronyms having to do with open and linked data. RDF = Resource Description Framework http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... There was some other acronym that I can't remember or find that Cameron was suggesting as a way of bundling an entire open data set of arbitrary format...lots of vowels, something like OAI... "open access...? NOTE... more... - Steve Koch

Cameron showed us some of the robots he and others have programmed for Google Wave. I learned that it's not crazily complicated to write a robot, and that you can use Google App Engine (http://code.google.com/appengi...) to host your code and run the robot. It currently runs Python and now Java. I still don't understand how it connects with Wave, but it solves a mystery to me of... more... - Steve Koch

(Coincidentally (or maybe not), right after waving with Cameron, Google Wave gave me my 20 invites to send out. Let me know if you need one!) - Steve Koch

I'm sure Cameron and others have already said this in their many fantastic presentations and blog posts about wave. But I was happy to hear Cameron agree with my thinking that google wave + robots would be a very good way of handling data analysis workflows. When we process unzipping data, there are a few layers of software involved. I imagine each software application being run in the... more... - Steve Koch

Cameron's current LaBLog at Rutherford can be found here: http://biolab.isis.rl.ac.uk/cameron... Hopefully I'll be able to get access to this to see the edit features (I "requested" an account by logging in with my yahoo openid). I had previously been impressed by the notebook, but today was really wowed when I saw him edit a new entry. The particular things was the ability to... more... - Steve Koch

+1 for a Wave invite, please (pmiller@liv.ac.uk). - Peter Miller

That's wonderful that Cameron visited your lab Steve! For all the usefulness of communication technologies nothing can replace a productive meatspace interaction. - Jean-Claude Bradley

I had a great time - meeting and talking with Koch and the team. Lots of very cool stuff going on and lots of ideas that just seemed to bubble out of it. The meatspace interaction is really important but having that bit of background about what was going on and the context and trust built up here on Friendfeed amongst other places makes the whole discussion a lot quicker and more interesting. - Cameron Neylon

Agree -- pre-meeting definitely made the in-person meeting very quick to start off. & @Peter Miller, sent the invite - Steve Koch

Sounds like a fun (and productive!) day - thanks for sharing it with us, Steve. Also, I would appreciate a Wave invite (if you have any left!) - thanks! tom.tullius@gmail.com - Tom Tullius

I hope to see some cool pics from this meet-up on Flickr :) Science builds upon Science especially in terms of ONS !! http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3358... - Graham Steel

@Tom sent invite (fyi it takes several days to arrive) @Graham I think this is the only picture they got, unfortunately! - Steve Koch

@Steve, Auch well. Best I can do with this 20.kB image is to B&W it, with a bit of res. conf.:- http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2620... - Graham Steel

@Graham, I think I'm missing something. Is there a whole slew of cool open science photos on Flickr somewhere? - Steve Koch

@Steve - I don't think there is..... yet. I take that back. Starter for 10 with http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3089... - Graham Steel

Small number of people use the tags openscience - http://www.flickr.com/photos... and science2.0 - http://www.flickr.com/photos.... - Neil Saunders

Thanks for wave, Steve - Peter Miller

Thanks, Steve - Tom Tullius from iPod

A few comments back, I was simply looking through this filter http://search.creativecommons.org/... with open science - At worst, some really cool Flickr/CC images for future usage for anyone. - Graham Steel

It occurs to me that in virtually every photo of me online I'm wearing the same jacket and same shirt. Typical academic... - Cameron Neylon

@Graham, loved that one: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3089... - Steve Koch

Cameron let me in on the mystery acronym: OAI-ORE "Open Archives Initiative" "Object Reuse and Exchange." http://www.openarchives.org/ore... - Steve Koch

For images there are the ONS logos created by Andy Lang and Shirley Wu http://onsclaims.wikispaces.com/ - Jean-Claude Bradley

Björn Brembs

Dead Flies Art (15 pics) - http://acidcow.com/pics...

October 9 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Giorgio Gilestro, Anders Norgaard, Jan Wessnitzer and 5 other people liked this

Berci Mesko, MD to Berci's feed, Medicine 2.0 Microcarnival

Brand New Pubmed - http://scienceroll.com/2009...

September 30 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Victor / Mendeley Team, Björn Brembs and Graham Steel liked this

WOAH.......... - Graham Steel

Werner Vogels

The Guardian is correct in quoting me; I strongly believe that Mendeley can change the face of science http://www.guardian.co.uk/technol... (f @mendeley_com)

September 21 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Victor / Mendeley Team and imabonehead liked this

Paulo Nuin

We are pleased to announce that Ricardo Vidal (@rvidal) will be joining our group as a graduate student soon

September 8 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Marcos de Carvalho, Alexander Griekspoor, Nils Reinton and 17 other people liked this

Not a "graduate liaison"? ;-) - Mr. Gunn

12 more comments

@Mr.Gunn lol - Ricardo Vidal

Congratulations to all concerned. - Bill Hooker

Thanks, Bill. We're really happy that is coming to Kingston. Poor kid will come just before winter, so we hope he stick around for longer, after the first snowstorm :-) - Paulo Nuin

Way cool!!! So how are you going to react when he opens up Mendeley :)? - Deepak Singh

Mendeley is currently block in the lab. He will have to prove capable of circumventing our firewall. - Paulo Nuin

Googling "firewall circumvention for dummies"... ;) - Ricardo Vidal

Awesome! Congrats! - Chris Lasher

Thanks :) - Ricardo Vidal

Wow, how cool. Glad to hear it. - Maureen from iPhone

Congratulations! - Yann Abraham

Now details, we want details... - Neil Saunders

Watch your back Paulo, they're trying to get an insider to remove your top search result for "mendeley review" :P Sounds fun. Good luck Ricardo! - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

Wow! When great people meet :) - Berci Mesko, MD

Cameron Neylon

Two papers submitted (one revised, one new). More to go over tomorrow. That feels like a useful day. Sleep now.

September 7 - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Habib and Victor / Mendeley Team liked this

Mo

RT @LeeBillings Awe-inspiring new zoomable 648 megapixel full-color all-sky panorama of the Milky Way: http://141.209.164.250/~axel...

September 2 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Victor / Mendeley Team and Yaroslav Nikolaev liked this

Bora Zivkovic

ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Victor Henning - http://scienceblogs.com/clock...

September 1 from A Blog Around The Clock - Comment - Like - Share

Jean-Claude Bradley and Victor / Mendeley Team liked this

Squid Read

ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Victor Henning [A Blog Around The Clock] - http://scienceblogs.com/clock...

September 1 from ScienceBlogs : Combined Feed - Comment - Like - Share

Victor / Mendeley Team liked this

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Victor Henning from Mendeley to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background? I was born in Hamburg/Germany in 1980, moved to London in January 2008, and as a direct consequence, have discovered my love for Marmite and the BBC. In between, I've dabbled in a great number of different things. When I was 16, I dreamed of having my own record label, so I worked for Sony Music in Berlin and Revelation Records in Huntington Beach. I then studied for a business degree in Koblenz, Brussels, and Oslo. I decided two switch my life ambition to producing films and worked in a film production company... - The Black Book

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Victor Henning from Mendeley to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my... more...

Mike Chelen to Mike's feed, PLoS ONE in the Media/Blogs, OpenSci Info

PLoS & Mendeley live on the Web! Science Hour with Leo Laporte & Dr. Kiki on Vimeo - http://vimeo.com/6315514

August 31 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Kubke, Björn Brembs, Peter Binfield and 4 other people liked this

I enjoyed this. I've been meaning to get a feed of DKSH for a while. As an aside: what the rest of the world doesn't realize is how much Brits love it when interlocutors take it upon themselves to mock their accents, because they do it so badly. :) - Andrew Spong

Jason Hoyt

Nice quote from Leo Laporte abt Mendeley during Science Hour, "It greases the wheels of science" 45mn in http://odtv.me/2009...

August 31 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Victor / Mendeley Team liked this

Leo's Ego Feed

Nice quote from Leo Laporte abt Mendeley during Science Hour, "It greases the wheels of science" 45mn in http://is.gd/2DYfD - http://twitter.com/jasonho...

August 31 from laporte - Twitter Search - Comment - Like - Share

Victor / Mendeley Team liked this

Leo Laporte to Leo's feed, TWiT Conversations

Live Now: Dr. Kiki's Science Hour with Kirsten Sanford and guests Jason Hoyt and Peter Binfield on the future of scientific journals. (Hint: it's online!) http://live.twit.tv. Discuss here...

August 27 - Comment - Like - Share

Graham Steel, Ian Caddick, Jason Stajich and 12 other people liked this

Go Jason! - Mr. Gunn

14 more comments

RT @einstein e = mc^2 - Ken Sheppardson

lol - Mr. Gunn

The article Dr. Kiki was just talking about: http://bjoern.brembs.net/news... - Mr. Gunn

Good points by Peter, consistent with Euan's expt found - don't expect people to create content on your site using your tools. You gotta go out and find it. - Mr. Gunn

More about downside risks of comments, with no consideration of possible upsides. Standard human behavior. - Mr. Gunn

Sorry, I can't listen as the player is always rebuffering. Same problem as before. - Todd Hoff

yeah, just went to rebufferring for me, too - Mr. Gunn

try http://ustream.tv/leolaporte - Leo Laporte

Cool, are the shows archived so I can start from the top? - Todd Hoff

I found my issue, the chat and stream can't run concurrently. I can only have one or the other. - Mr. Gunn

I'm having trouble finding their site. How is it spelled? - Caleb

I found it! http://www.mendeley.com/ - Caleb

For those that missed part or all of the show, it usually appears at http://odtv.me/categor... a day or two later. Look for ep. 14. - Matt Leifer

Really great show! They hit all the relevant points. Perfect intro into the subject. Just watched it all, recommend you do, too. - Björn Brembs

Watched it again today. What a great discussion. Liked the way they kept in the intro and outro in the archived version. Blogged it a few hours ago. http://mcblawg.blogspot.com/2009... - Graham Steel

Science Online London: Martin Fenner

List of blog posts about Science Online London now at 41. Happy reading and commenting, and let me know if I missed any: http://network.nature.com/people...

August 25 - Comment - Like - Share

Jan Schmirmund, Jamie McQuay, Victor / Mendeley Team and 5 other people liked this

Oh. Thanks! - Heather

3 more comments

http://scienceoftheinvisible.b... - AJCann

see Dave Munger's http://ff.im/7bgKy - Duncan Hull

Brian Kelly http://ff.im/7aP0H - Duncan Hull

I've added these blog posts about Science Online London (and a few more). - Martin Fenner

Peter Binfield

PLoS and Mendeley appearing on the Science Hour tomorrow. Check us out: http://www.mendeley.com/blog...

August 26 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Mr. Gunn, Björn Brembs, Victor / Mendeley Team and Graham Steel liked this

laura

08/21/09 PHD comic: 'Unemployment vs. Graduate Stipends' - http://www.phdcomics.com/comics...

August 22 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Victor / Mendeley Team, Björn Brembs and Valentina* liked this

Oh so sad... - The Neurocritic

That's not even the problem: for a few years, that kind of "poverty" is easily endurable and even fun (swap ramen recipes with all your "poor" friends, etc). The problem is that your income does not go up much, and becomes considerably less reliable, *after* you graduate with a PhD. - Bill Hooker

Björn Brembs

As if we needed more evidence - http://bjoern.brembs.net/news...

August 19 from bjoern.brembs.blog : a... - Comment - Like - Share

Bill Hooker, Alec, Ruchira S. Datta and 14 other people liked this

As usual, the best parts are in the addendum. - Daniel Mietchen

8 more comments

As Björn says, "FUBAR." - Steve Koch

So did the guy really lose his business? - Mr. Gunn

Wow, that's comedy gold right there. Hilarious :) - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

Astonishing. - Matthew Todd

Am I the only one wondering why the comment wasn't just published on his blog? - Alec

@Alec: no, that was my thought as well. I'd have given up on the journal after about the second round, and just put the information on the web. Hell, I didn't even rtwt, it was making me feel ill. - Bill Hooker

The stamina of the guy is indeed amazing! I guess that's what you do when you think this comment is the only chance you've got to clear your name... - Björn Brembs

@Victor / Mendeley Team : You should add a checkbox feature to Mendeley ("this article is whack") and allow links to external blogs or whatever that described the whackness. It'd be cool for a warning to pop up for all other users based on common PMID or DOI. Of course you probably have ratings / shared comments thing in mind, but this would be a subset of that :) - Steve Koch

I read the entire story when a friend of mine shared your blog entry via Google Reader. The entire story is very very saddening (despite the brilliant sense of humor of Prof. Rick Trebino). Even though I totally agree that not mentioning the title of the paper, name of the journal and editors is the most honorable way to cover this story, I would definitely love to know who they were..... more... - meren

Alejandro to Alejandro's feed, Funny Pics and Videos

xkcd - Newton and Leibniz - http://xkcd.com/626/

August 21 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Victor / Mendeley Team, Alex Scrivener, अभिषेक(Abhishek) Das and 15 other people liked this

AWESOME!!!!! - Ladybug Heather

Horatio Newton. LAWL - ha3rvey (just a friend)

Michal

Oh, just realised today is the first day of my 'proper' employment at Mendeley, hoorah!

August 21 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Victor / Mendeley Team liked this

Mr. Gunn

Mendeley Manages Your Documents on Your Desktop and in the Cloud - Document management - Lifehacker - http://lifehacker.com/5334254...

August 17 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Jean-Claude Bradley, Steve Koch, Ricardo Vidal and 2 other people liked this

Good Lifehacker review of #Mendeley. - Mr. Gunn from Bookmarklet

Cameron Neylon

The trouble with business models (Facebook buys Friendfeed) - http://blog.openwetware.org/science...

August 11 from Science in the open - Comment - Like - Share

Cesar Sanchez, Steve Koch, Bill Anderson and 41 other people liked this

Absolutely, an opportunity for someone to throw out their "FB4Sci" model and do something useful, learning from the success of FF. I hear NPG have one or two talented web developers :-) - Neil Saunders

24 more comments

It's that or we try and tease those talented web developers out by setting up our own startup :-) - Cameron Neylon

How many of TLS's 1000 or so members would pay for a FF clone? How much would they pay? Would that be enough to keep a small FF-for-science startup solvent? - Bill Hooker

I still think we lose a lot of the breezy informal conversation. There are so many "outsiders" here which enriches things. Having said that a disributed open source platform is a good biogangy project. We have github, some great rails programmers (or other platforms). Worth a shot? We can even host on something like heroku and grow over time. But, it has to be handled like a proper open source project and it should be kept simple - Deepak Singh from iPhone

I'm still very curious about where FF goes. That team is just darn good. You realize why they did such good work at the GOOG - Deepak Singh from iPhone

I was reviewing some old blog posts that compared lifestreaming apps. The vast majority are no more. There are others with similar features, but the performance of FriendFeed is its stand-out feature. Talented team for sure. - Neil Saunders

As one of those "outsiders," I was astonished to read in Cameron's post that FF is a community of scientists/researchers. I joined it as a community of librarians and library people--mixed in with a whole lot of others. (Since library people can't possibly be more than 1% of FF's population. What % are scientists/researchers?) The mixing of scientists and library people came as a usually pleasant surprise. Still does. - Walt Crawford

Walt, indeed. Those serendipitous interactions would be lost in most existing scientific social sites - Deepak Singh from iPhone

and just as I got the hang of ff too - Anna Croft

It is hard to know what is going to happen to FF but I suspect it will stick around for a while. Facebook has no reason to keep it but also no real reason to shut it down. FF can always be used to test new ideas for example. - Pedro Beltrao

Walt, its not so much that FF _is_ a community of scientists/researchers as that there is amongst the wider FF community a signficant number of us. And I was trying to include the library/knowledge management community within that as many of the issues seem the same. - Cameron Neylon

And definitely agree with Deepak. the ability of anyone to come in and contribute has been a real strength and something I would like to see continuing however the system evolves. Most of my best thinking has come from suggestions and perspectives either directly from FF or from people I have met and conversed with here. - Cameron Neylon

Cameron: Indeed--but look at the other comments here and elsewhere, the calls for a true silo. It's fair to assume that I'd never show up on an FB4SCI or FF4SCI. Being a porous community within a larger community is very different than having a community that's effectively closed, either by design or through obscurity. - Walt Crawford

For anyone with access [grrr] Heather and Eva have both made useful comments on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/note... (oh the irony...) - Cameron Neylon

Walt, Silos have their uses in making the local problems tractable. The interesting thing is the way FF seems to connect those silos up. Anything we build has to build on that experience - walled gardens are useless in the long term and my impression is that the community here in FF get that. That makes this community potentially very important as the seed for the next step if we really... more... - Cameron Neylon

Of course, if you haven't been friended by either Heather or Eva on Facebook (see Cameron's comment above -- plus one --) you still can't see their useful comments even if you have a profile over there. I don't even think I'm sure of last names in this instance. All of which would seem to bolster Cameron's point. Here it's less important if you know someone's name; you can still see their contributions assuming that one of your FF connections has recommended their link or comment. - Jill O'Neill

Cameron, maybe you can just post a (partial) screenshot? Supposing they agree with that. - Meryn Stol

I wouldn't mind lending a hand in a startup :-) - Jan Aerts

Cameron, very nice summary of what we like about FriendFeed. On the positive side, I see a business opportunity for one of the social networks for scientists to jump in. Nature Network could do that (I'm obviously biased here), but it has a long way to go. - Martin Fenner

This speaks volumes for the overriding importance of design and UI. Get that right and you may do OK, even if your community doesn't end up being the people you're targeting. Isn't that really the lesson here? I'm sure no one on the friendfeed team expected or intended the uptake by scientists and librarians to this extent. Perhaps instead of a FFfor Scientists, what we need is a... more... - Mr. Gunn

Jill, exactly my point, and I'm not comfortable with copying their comments across becase they are made in a "private" space. As Walt suggested silos serve none of us in the long term. The best insights come from outside your immediate circle. Martin +++. I think NN could do this. As could others. Anybody have any inside juice on whether Nature ha've filled the Communities Manager... more... - Cameron Neylon

OK, Cameron, so the question really is at what point does people's annoyance at their favorite service dying/getting bought out overcome poor UI and signup barriers? I wouldn't guess we're there yet, primarily because UI and features are so bad other places. I'd love to find out I'm wrong. - Mr. Gunn

Instead of individual subs, wonder if librarians would pay for institutional access to a service like FF? Hope Elsevier doesn't do something like this... - Joe from iPod

Note: I am a librarian, and we don't have $ for something like this right now, but maybe later, if the db could do a good job of tracking citations, comments and refs like Zotero or refworks. - Joe from iPod

Joe, Given a flat or reducing budgets and rising journal subs its hard enough to keep the journals let alone fund a social networking service. I could see the benefits to my clients but it would be doubtful that I could convince the decision makers.EDIT- just saw your second post. Maybe if it was already part of a db but then who would want a silo-ed vendor solution? - suelibrarian

For those who requested: Eva's comment from Facebook "Yes, I actually like this (especially the second last paragraph). FF was never meant to be made to talk to about research, and my "issues" with it are predominantly the result of overexposure to people saying it's so "perfect" for that use. And it *was* just a matter of time before they sold to someone. I'm amused by the drama about... more... - Cameron Neylon

Michael Nielsen

If you wanted to scan a thousand books, how would you do it? I'm looking into digitizing my library.

August 2 - Comment - Like - Share

Christopher Granade, Fiacre O'Duinn, Brian Ahier and 5 other people liked this

Maybe look up how Google is doing it? - Meryn Stol

45 more comments

If you bought any of those books from amazon, then some of them may be searchable through your "amazon library". Having said that, it's spotty coverage (in terms of which books are indexed). Same thing for google. - Ilya Grigorik

I would first look on certain websites (which I would obviously never use myself and certainly don't know the URLs of) to check whether somebody has already scanned them. - Matt Leifer

Meryn - Done that. Not much help... - Michael Nielsen

Ilya - I probably bought a couple hundred (or more) from Amazon. SO that's a great idea. - Michael Nielsen

Incidentally, I found http://sealedabstract.com/... very helpful on this subject. But it'd still be hundreds of hours of work, minimum. - Michael Nielsen

I never realized I could search through my Amazon purchases. Interesting. Quite a value-add from Amazon! - Meryn Stol

Looks like Google will give you full access if you scan the barcodes: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009... Not clear if this is useful for re-reading, or if it's possible to download... - Michael Nielsen

I tried that.. no dice. It only works for books that have been "open sourced" by publisher or are not under copyright, which is to say, basically nothing. Ok, not entirely true, but of limited value.. - Ilya Grigorik

Thanks, Ilya. That's one weird Google blog post, then. ("It works for all the books except the ones it doesn't work for. That is, most of them.") - Michael Nielsen

the way I understood the Google barcode scan was that since it appears you own a physical copy of the book, you can have access to a digital copy. Am I wrong in this, because I was going to do it for my books. - Kimber Scott from BuddyFeed

Kimber, yes, but the amount of digitized books on Google Books is limited. Actually, the bar code does not constitute proof of ownership. You can do fulltext search through all books on Google Books. But with "my library" you can limit your search to a group of books. (Pedro, yeah exactly) - Meryn Stol

I just gave it a try. I scanned a couple of barcodes but its really just a faster way to create a list. I don't think the access rights changes at all. - Pedro Beltrao

That's the thing.. The scan just gives you the ISBN, which you can find anywhere anyway - it doesn't prove that you own the book in any way, shape or form. For this reason, only books that are not copyrighted are available for search. - Ilya Grigorik

Ilya, there are copyrighted books searchable on Google Book search. Just not all of them because not all publishers have signed up for the program, or have not committed their whole library. Full search does not mean you can read it in full though! - Meryn Stol

Ah, well that's good news! Now we just need to get all the other publishers on the same bandwagon. ;-) - Ilya Grigorik

Major project! I guess ideally, there'd be a way to prove that you own a legitimate copy of a book which would then grant you access to a digital version. Something like scan and upload one page. - Neil Saunders

Neil - Yeah, that'd be very nice. Sadly, I haven't found anything like that. - Michael Nielsen

yeah, but that's not going to happen either - publishers are more than happy to charge you twice for the same material - once for print and once for e. Related, Springer now has a $25 print on demand service available to patrons of libraries that buy the big ebook packages - we only have it for medical books right now, or i'd try it - Christina Pikas

Maybe a pragmatic 80/20 split - re-buy the most important books (those that are not from Amazon) as e-books; then decide if you want to cut off the binding on the remaining books and have em scanned (as suggested in article), or make do with a semi good scan without damaging the book (pay a student to run them through a copy/scanning machine). - Christof TD

Please try to save the integrity of the book. You may find that they will be quite valuable. Were some of them gifts? Do they have inscriptions you want to keep? Some things to consider. - Melanie Reed

On 2nd thought you'd better wait a little (machines like the Google book scanner should become more readily available soon) - reading about the Google Book Scanning Machine: http://www.npr.org/blogs... - Christof TD

Here we go - Book Drive Pro (looks quite industrial; but still doesn't solve the page-turning problem) - http://pro.atiz.com/ or http://mini.atiz.com/ (video on the pro version site shows the scanning workflow); ~several hundred hours for 1000 books... at least it gives you a high-quality outcome without damaging books - Christof TD

Hmm - you could build this thing yourself (Atiz Book Drive Pro): make a V-shape cradle, including a plastic V-shape that comes down on the book (like in the video), several mounts for two DSLR cameras and a little black tent with lights -> then run an edge-detection algorithm on the pictures taken using the Python Imaging Library; this leaves only finding an open-source OCR library. - Christof TD

Christof - For all but a tiny fraction of the books (which I'll probably keep), I'm not worried about destroying them as part of the scanning process. Your 80/20 suggestion is a really interesting one... - Michael Nielsen

You could donate the destroyed books to a local school science library; maybe the library will find the resources to glue them back together again :-) - Christof TD

More likely the library will waste valuable staff time and resources evaluating and then discarding a book the school cannot use. Please don't use libraries as a dumping ground! Thank you. - D0r0th34

If you are a DIY person check out http://www.geocities.jp/takasci... and http://www.instructables.com/id... . My personal solution (I got of most my books some years ago - some I kept and scanned them manually) is a change of mindset. Most books are just dead trees that catch dust and are need much to rarely to excuse... more... - Konrad Förstner

Thanks for the link: http://www.instructables.com/id... ...this was exactly what I was thinking (see video at that link for workflow); 20 min. for each book is not too bad. Update: their open source software takes 3 hours to process a book into a PDF. - Christof TD

Here's my stupid idea: 1) The most difficult part: Build a little stand that automatically flips through the pages - probably doesn't need to be as sophisticated as in the Instructables link above. 2) Take a HD video cam and make a video of the pages being flipped. 3) Write a little script that takes screencaps from the video every other second, after the pages have been flipped. 4) Send all the screencaps to Evernote to use their OCR and search. - Victor / Mendeley Team

But then again, it would probably be easier to just sync a photo camera with the page flipping :-) Like I said, stupid idea! - Victor / Mendeley Team

Here are the heavyweights: Treventus Book Scanner Robot (at Bavarian State Library, Munich) - http://www.treventus.com/booksca... and Google/ Microsoft supposedly use Kirtas high-performance scanners - http://content.zdnet.com/2346-95... ... ah, the page-flipper uses suction: http://www.kirtas.com/ - Christof TD

Video of Treventus ScanRobot in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Christof TD

Ah, sweet.. Now i just need one of those for my house! :-) - Ilya Grigorik

buy a high speed scanner - abuzarhamza

abuzarhamza - Even at 20 pages per minute, with roughly 300,000 pages that's roughly 300 hours of scanning... - Michael Nielsen

How about this: (1) create a new organization called the Nielsen University library (2) offer your library's collection to google to become part of their scanned collection (3) make the one condition of the offer to google be that you get the scans for private use - Jonathan Eisen

I suppose that this would not be a good time to point out to you that ownership of the physical volume doesn't entitle you to scan the content and create a digital version; that's what got Google into trouble in the first place. You, as an individual, haven't the right to create (even for personal, private use) digital versions of content where other entities hold the rights. - Jill O'Neill

Don't forget that Michael is covered by Canadian law, which is significantly more lenient on copyright than US law. That's why I suggested finding pirate copies on the net. I believe that under Canadian law might not be liable for downloading them, but only for uploading. However, the situation is complicated so don't quote me on that. After downloading, you are in no better or worse shape than if you had scanned the books yourself. - Matt Leifer

I note - I had my tongue planted deeply in my cheek when I said he should get google to do the scanning - just in case people cannot see where my tongue was - Jonathan Eisen

Jonathan: Your original comment gave me, at least, quite a smile :-). Sadly, I can't imagine Google would find much in my library that they don't already have. Maybe the classic "Venus on the Half Shell"... - Michael Nielsen

Jill - Is it true in Canada that you can't legally transfer between media in this way? I know I've been told that in some jurisdictions this definitely _is_ allowed, but I don't recall in which jurisdictions. - Michael Nielsen

Michael: I was speaking from a US-centric view. That said, I would be surprised if -- to pick a publisher at random -- HarperCollins (whether US or Canada) would look favorably on such scanning activity. Libraries are permitted to scan for purposes of preservation under specific conditions, but I am not sure that the same permission has ever legislatively been extended to private... more... - Jill O'Neill

Have you read Victor Vinge's Rainbows End? ok it's a bit extreme but it works for gene sequencing :) - Alexei

the fujitsu snapscan is reasonably good but v manual and destructive, I've taken to guillotining spines and feeding pages while watching tv .. ~ couple hrs / book. End result not that good, big bulky pdfs. Getting eprints would be much better. - Alexei

Thankyou, by the way, to everyone who's been commenting on this! - Michael Nielsen

If you want to use all free and open source tools, read this blog post: http://philikon.wordpress.com/2009... - Nate Aune

Pawel Szczesny

Mendeley team will find it interesting - I've stumbled across forum thread where Polish grad students are recommending Mendeley instead of Endnote :).

July 29 - Comment - Like - Share

Mr. Gunn, Björn Brembs and Victor / Mendeley Team liked this

Thanks for sharing this find, Pawel! :-) - Victor / Mendeley Team

Care to share a link? - Jennifer Melinn

Jennifer, it's a closed forum - the thread is not available without registration. - Pawel Szczesny