Year: 2017

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How we know what we know: The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) helps unlock millions of connections between scholarly research – Wikimedia Blog

The Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with 29 publishers and a network of organizations, including the Public Library of Science (PLOS), the Internet Archive, Mozilla, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and many others, announced the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), which aims to make citation data freely available for anyone to access.

Scholarly publishers deposit the bibliographic record and raw metadata for their publications to Crossref. Thanks to a growing list of publishers participating in I4OC, reference metadata for nearly 15 million scholarly papers in Crossref’s database will become available to the public without copyright restriction.1 This data includes bibliographic information (like the title of a paper, its author(s), and publication date), machine readable identifiers like DOIs (Digital Object Identifier, a common way to identify scholarly works), as well as data on how papers reference one another. It will help draw connections within scientific research, find and surface relevant information, and enrich knowledge in places like Wikipedia and Wikidata.

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/04/06/initiative-for-open-citations/

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My Twitter Digest for 04/10/2017

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Book publishing in the digital age | TechCrunch

“The lack of video, the lack of audio,” writes Richard Nash in What is the Business of Literature?, “is a feature of literature, not a bug.” This is exactly how we look at the book business at Thought Catalog. Books aren’t an antiquated technology. Books are cutting-edge technology. In fact, books are the greatest virtual reality machines on the market. While virtual reality gear like Oculus engulfs the brain to present a different reality, books engage the brain and present a different reality through a more creative exchange between medium and self.

Source: Book publishing in the digital age | TechCrunch

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Electron | Build cross platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.


Build cross platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS

It’s easier than you think

If you can build a website, you can build a desktop app. Electron is a framework for creating native applications with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It takes care of the hard parts so you can focus on the core of your application.

Watch the video

Source: Electron | Build cross platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

This powers the Slack and WordPress.com desktop apps among other things. It was developed by Github and is open source. I hadn’t heard of this until this afternoon, but it certainly seems like something that is worth taking a look at. HT to Dave Winer who’s using it for his new Electric River app.

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My Twitter Digest for 04/04/2017

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5 open source RSS feed readers | Opensource.com

When Google Reader was discontinued four years ago, many “technology experts” called it the end of RSS feeds.

And it’s true that for some people, social media and other aggregation tools are filling a need that feed readers for RSS, Atom, and other syndication formats once served. But old technologies never really die just because new technologies come along, particularly if the new technology does not perfectly replicate all of the use cases of the old one. The target audience for a technology might change a bit, and the tools people use to consume the technology might change, too.

But RSS is no more gone than email, JavaScript, SQL databases, the command line, or any number of other technologies that various people told me more than a decade ago had numbered days. (Is it any wonder that vinyl album sales just hit a 25-year peak last year?) One only has to look at the success of online feed reader site Feedly to understand that there’s still definitely a market for RSS readers.

Source: 5 open source RSS feed readers | Opensource.com

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My Twitter Digest for 04/03/2017