BioMed Central Blog
Daring to go digital: Interactive discussion reveals how to maximise your online reach
On the 26 March, BioMed Central's Head of Public Relations Matt McKay joined a panel of experts to discuss emerging trends within the healthcare industry.
At 'Dare to Go Digital, an interactive webcast hosted by De Facto Communications, the increasing importance of digital marketing for healthcare and medical communications was debated. The panel gave their insights into how you can make the most out of your budget, whilst effectively reaching your target audiences
The archived version of the webcast is now available on:
http://insitu.stream57.com/daretogodigital/
Those interested in learning more should sign up for BioMed Central's free "Online and on-message: Going Digital eMarketing Seminar" held on the 20th May both as a live event and as a webcast.
Posted by Charlotte Webber at 15:59 Comments (1)
Webcite links provide access to archived copy of linked web pages
Anyone who has tried to follow web links in an scientific article published several years ago will be familiar with the problem. You click a link, only to get a 'Server not responding' message, or a 'Page not found' error.
This lack of permanence of web links (sometimes known as link rot) is a general phenomenon across the web, but it is a particular problem in the case of published scientific research. On the one hand, the coherence of the published scientific record depends on being able to refer back to the articles including the online material that they refer to. But on the other hand, the character of scientific research projects (which tend to be funded for a few years at a time) and of scientific careers (which tend to involved frequent shifts between institutions) mean that scientific web pages become inaccessible with worrying regularity.
In this electronic age, it is not realistic to expect authors to refrain entirely from mentioning web pages in their articles, ephemeral as they may be. So, since late 2005, BioMed Central has been working in partnership with the WebCite initiative, based at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation at Toronto General Hospital, to preserve archival copies of all web pages linked to from BioMed Central articles.
Wherever you see a 
logo, whether in the body of an article, or in the reference section, you can click on that link to view a version of that page that has been archived at WebCite.
For papers published since 2006, this archived copy will have been harvested immediately after publication, and so another benefit of this process, as well as providing some degree of digital permanence, is that it allows you to view the web page as it was at the time of publication.
For example, this Journal of Biology article links to the BioGRID database. The WebCite copy provides a snapshot of the BioGRID home page, including stats on the database, as it was at the time of publication.
WebCite is not, by itself, a perfect solution. Snapshots of web pages such as those preserved by WebCite cannot fully replicate the functionality of a complex database-driven web site. Even single web pages may in some cases cause problems for the WebCite archiving robot, but this is improving all the time (please let us know if you spot any problems). Lastly, in order to provide long term digital permanence, it is important that the WebCite project itself should have long term sustainable support. To this end, we encourage other publishers to participate in the initiative, and to consider ways of supporting it, perhaps via a similar collective model as that used for the CrossRef linking initiative.
The caveats notwithstanding, a basic principle of digital archiving is that the sooner you start, the less you lose (as the Internet Archive has demonstrated). So we are very pleased to be working with WebCite to ensure that as much of possible of the web material linked to by BioMed Central authors is preserved for the long term.
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 20:50 Comments (2)
Enhanced MathML support for BioMed Central articles
With the impending publication of PhysMath Central's first particle physics and cosmology papers, we have been busy working to ensure that systems are in place to deal smoothly and efficiently with the complex mathematical formulae involved.
Computational biologists will see the benefit of this too, with improved layout for equation-rich PDFs, and smarter handling of TeX submissions, for all BioMed Central journals. One such improvement, which has just been released, is an enhancement to the way in which we use MathML to provide a structured, reusable version of formulae in articles.
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 20:50 Comments (0)
Open Repository - open source in action
DSpace, the software platform
which provides the foundation for BioMed Central's Open Repository service, is proving
to be a great example of collaboration between the commercial and academic
sectors on an open source project.
[Read More]
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 19:50 Comments (1)
Semantics, open access and Freebase
The recent panel on open access/semantic web/web 2.0 at South by Southwest was well attended and prompted lively discussion. Also, this being South by Southwest, several of the attendees immediately blogged their notes on the panel - handy for those who couldn't make it to Austin.
One interesting coincidence of timing was that right in the same week as this panel discussion took place, Danny Hillis's new venture, Freebase, was being launched.
Freebase is an interesting and ambitious idea, that combines all three of the trends we discussed on the panel - open access and reuse, user-generated content, and semantic classification (i.e. structuring information on the web in order to make its meaning accessible to computers). There is a good discussion of Freebase on Tim O'Reilly's blog - Freebase is a really nice example of the kind of innovation made possible by open licensing systems such as the Creative Commons Attribution License used for all BioMed Central's open access articles.
A representative of Metaweb (the company behind Freebase) came along to the panel, and confirmed that they will be incorporating BioMed Central's open access content into Freebase. I'm looking forward to seeing how Freebase works in practice - watch this space...
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 15:52 Comments (1)
Top CiteULike tags for BioMed Central articles
Tagging (allowing users to assign their own short keywords to items on the web) has taken off through its use on sites such as del.ic.ious (for web bookmarks) and Flickr
(for digital photographs). Tagging is also a great fit for scientific
research articles, and its use in this way was pioneered by CiteULike, and later Connotea.
BioMed Central is actively
working with the developers behind CiteULike to explore the synergies
between open access and bibliographic tagging. As a small preview
of collaborations to come, CiteULike has created a dynamic tag cloud for
BioMed Central
[Read More]
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 12:00 Comments (1)