PLoS and Mendeley recently closed their Binary Battle contest to build the best apps that make science more open using PLoS and/or Mendeley’s APIs (Application Programming Interface). There are some big names on the judging panel, such as Tim O’Reilly (coined the term ‘Web 2.0’), James Powell (CTO of Thomson Reuters) and Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon.com).  The entries have been whittled down to 11 finalists and the winner will be announced on 30th November 2011. Read on for details of some of these finalists or go here a full list: http://dev.mendeley.com/api-binary-battle more…

With Amazon claiming a breakthrough success for its Kindle, having announced that eBooks now exceed paperback sales on its US site, the BMJ Group is developing its offerings on this platform. Since the beginning of 2010 “for every 100 paperback books Amazon sold, the company sold 115 Kindle books”.

One of the neat little sub-features of Amazon’s Kindle is being able to subscribe to blogs on it. You have to pay a token amount for the privilege, but for Kindle users, it makes sense as the content is delivered to you wirelessly for your favourite blogs. BJSM (British Journal of Sports Medicine) has recently released its popular blog onto the Kindle. The BJSM blog provides the sports medicine, physical activity and exercise performance communities with a forum to interact about a range of relevant issues.

Kindle blogs are fully downloaded onto your Kindle so you can read them even when not wirelessly connected. And unlike RSS readers which often only provide headlines, blogs on Kindle give you full text content and images, and are updated wirelessly throughout the day. More of the BMJ blogs will be making their way on to Kindle in the near future so let us know which you’d like to see first!

From the end of last year, BMJ blogs became fully open access using the creative commons license. They have always been free to access, and it is likely that most of our readers will not immediately notice any change, but there is a subtle difference.

The term “open access” implies much more than just “free”. According to the Wellcome Trust, articles to be listed as open access must be freely available immediately, and publishers must also allow for their free reuse. This means that articles can be copied, distributed, displayed, performed and modified into derivative works by any user.

So although readers have always been able to freely access our blogs, they can now reuse our blog content, as long as they credit the original BMJ blog in any derivative works they produce. It is also useful for our blog authors who can now post their own blogs elsewhere, for example on their institutional websites.

The hope is that this will increase the readership of our blogs, as they are highlighted elsewhere and bought to the attention of more people. It is also in keeping with the “social” aspect of blogging. We have found that using Twitter and Facebook to promote our blogs has had a huge impact on traffic to the site. Users like to share links and comment on blogs, and this encourages others to take a look at the site as well.

It is also fits in with the BMJ publishing model, as all our research articles are formally open access.

Have a look at the various BMJ blogs at https://stg-blogs.bmj.com/bmj/

N.B. Please note that this change does not apply to the BMJ Journal blogs or those that do not contain the creative commons logo.

by Juliet Dobson, Assistant web editor and blogs editor for bmj.com