“As the volume of academic literature explodes, scholars rely on filters to select the most relevant and significant sources from the rest,” the altmetrics manifesto argues. “Unfortunately, scholarship’s three main filters for importance are failing.” Peer review “has served scholarship well” but has become slow and unwieldy and rewards conventional thinking. Citation-counting measures such as the h-index take too long to accumulate. And the impact factor of journals gets misapplied as a way to assess an individual researcher’s performance, which it wasn’t designed to do.

There are various tools that provide an easy interface for finding out readership metrics for a researcher. Until recently, none of these allowed users to choose what is included or enabled non-traditional artefacts to be combined with traditional ones. This is where Total-Impact, a new offering from the altmetric community, comes in. more…

The winner of the Mendeley/PLoS API Binary Battle has been announced, after two months of shortlisting, public voting and expert panel deliberation (by the likes of Werner Vogels, Juan Enriquez, Tim O’Reilly, James Powell, and John Wilbanks).

The overall grand prize of the 2011 Mendeley-PLoS Binary Battle, receiving $10,001 and $1,000 of Amazon Web Service credits, went to openSNP.

openSNP allows customers of direct-to-customer genetic tests to publish their test results, find others with similar genetic variations, learn more about their results, find the latest primary literature on their variations and help scientists to find new associations.

openSNP is a community-driven platform for publicly sharing genetic information, designed to enable crowdsourcing of associations between genetic traits and the physical manifestation of those traits, such as eye colour or propensity for some diseases. With openSNP, you can share your personal genome from 23andMe (personal genomics and biotechnology company helping customers understand their own genetic information) or deCODEme (biopharmaceutical company) to find the latest relevant research and let scientists discover new genetic associations. more…

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…

In a previous post, we introduced Mendeley, the reference manager and academic social network that’s taking the research world by storm, even scooping an award in the Telegraph’s Start-Up 100 Awards. At the time of writing, Mendeley reports that 1,113,597 people have signed up and over 106 million scientific papers have been uploaded. Medicine is a particularly popular discipline, with over 8 million papers and almost 3,000 groups.

Over the past few weeks we have been working with Mendeley to help you better organise your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest medical research. We are in the process of sending Mendeley a complete metadata set, so that full and accurate bibliographic data of all BMJ articles are stored in the Mendeley database. In addition, we have incorporated a ‘web importer’ button across our journals at article-level, so that it takes just one click to add any BMJ paper to your Mendeley library. more…

Recently crowned winner of the Telegraph’s Start-Up 100 Awards in the education, recruitment and jobs category, Mendeley, a research collaboration tool, has enjoyed a good deal of coverage in the press. It’s often referred to as “a fusion of iTunes and Last.fm for science” and  Dr Werner Vogels, chief technology officer of Amazon, was even reported to have said that if they got it right, they could change the face of science. more…