The Simpsons

Wouldn't normally plug Nature content here, but there's an interview with Al Jean in this week's Nature Podcast that's worth a listen (it's only five minutes long). It'll also appear in the print edition.

Piltdown angel: In "Lisa the Skeptic" an almost complete human skeleton with angel's wings pits science — Lisa and guest star Stephen Jay Gould — against faith, as defended by Ned Flanders: "Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends. Well I say that there are some things we don't want to know. Important things!" - from the top ten science moments in the Simpsons

Didn't think much of the trailer but apparently the film is brilliant.

Physics World covered science in the Simpsons too. A quick Google search also turns up this introduction to physics that uses scences from the Simpsons as a jumping off point. Not convinced that there's a market for Simpsons themed physics textbooks myself but hey...

Improving science blog platforms

I've posted on Nascent asking for a wishlist of plugins and tweaks to make blogging software more scientist friendly.

I'm pretty sure that lots of 'one coder and a free weekend could save thousands of (wo)man hours of blog gruntwork' type scenarios exist in science blogging in general. Let's find them...

Seeing as I'm a stone-age Blogger.com user I'm probably missing out on all sorts of cool stuff, of course. We only got tagging a couple of months ago.

EasyPG

Pierre Far from BlogSci has written an excellent WordPress plugin called EasyPG that helps you mark up blog posts for Postgenomic (and Chemical Blogspace).

Now we just need to find somebody who can write MoveableType plugins...

CrossRef metadata for all!

(via Code4Lib) CrossRef currently has a competition running. Submit a proposal for an innovative service that uses CrossRef data and if you're selected you can get an account for free (giving you access to the CrossRef database, which normally costs $$$).

In case you haven't heard of CrossRef:

CrossRef's specific mandate is to be the citation linking backbone for all scholarly information in electronic form. CrossRef is a collaborative reference linking service that functions as a sort of digital switchboard. It holds no full text content, but rather effects linkages through Digital Object Identifiers (DOI), which are tagged to article metadata supplied by the participating publishers. The end result is an efficient, scalable linking system through which a researcher can click on a reference citation in a journal and access the cited article.

Simplistically, CrossRef can supply the basic metadata (title, authors, journal details) associated with DOIs from the scientific literature.

In case you haven't heard of DOIs: DOIs are unique, resolvable identifiers for digital content (papers or figures, for example..). This paper has DOI 10.1186/1743-422X-4-67 . If you go to the CrossRef homepage and enter that string into the DOI resolver you'll be redirected to wherever the owner of the DOI (BioMedCentral, in this case) says the paper currently resides.

An example of how this data is used: when a paper is published the references at the bottom of the page can be hyperlinked by doing a reverse lookup on the CrossRef database i.e. asking 'what's the DOI of the paper with this title and author list'?

Another example: imagine a scholarly bookmarking system like Connotea or Zotero. When somebody bookmarks a paper you could scrape the title, authors, etc. directly from the HTML and hope that it doesn't break, or you could just scrape the DOI and then get all of the other metadata from CrossRef.

I think the competition is a good idea. My only problem with it is that IMHO CrossRef data should be free for non-commercial use anyway. At the moment it sorta kinda is; there's a 'demo' interface which you can use to try the service out.

If CrossRef really want to encourage innovative uses of their data then they should open up the database to anybody who wants to build (free, publicly accessible) applications on top of it.

Sure, CrossRef costs money to run but surely more people and open systems using DOIs in turn make it more worthwhile for publishers or software vendors to sign up as commercial members?

In any case if you've got a brilliant biomedical mashup in mind that might benefit you should apply. The deadline for proposals is July 15th.