“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…