Category Archives: Uncategorized
Nature’s free-view links on PubChase
A few days ago, Nature announced that they will allow readers with subscription to share links for free viewing of their articles. Many in the media have mistaken this to be a move towards open access by the Nature Publishing Group. … Continue reading
Save the date: participative Bay Area OA week event for Generation Open
A few local Open Access people – Liz Allen (ScienceOpen), Pete Binfield (PeerJ, with Georgina Gurnhill in the UK), Lenny Teytelman (Zappy Lab) and Laurence Bianchini (My Science Work), who are expanding to the Bay Area, welcome) – got together … Continue reading
ZappyLab’s Guide to Crowdfunding
From February to March 15, we ran a successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for protocols.io – our free, up-to-date, crowdsourced repository of life science protocols. Launching and running this Kickstarter campaign was simultaneously one of the smartest and one of the … Continue reading
We Can Fix Peer Review Now
Imagine a software company that solicits user feedback with, “Please let us know what does and does not work in the current release and what you would like to see in the future. However, keep in mind that we will … Continue reading
Knowledge Should Come to You
The goal of ZappyLab (the company behind PubChase) is to transform information exchange between researchers. But enabling the sharing of critical information via our mobile suite and its visualization on protocols.io is just half the story. The other half of … Continue reading
Was Henry Ford an idiot? (Will Scientists Use Mobile in the Lab?)
For two years now, ZappyLab has been building mobile tools for laboratory researchers. For two years we have heard the concern that scientists won’t adopt mobile technology for their experimental work. The skeptics’ reasons generally fall into one of the following … Continue reading
Academic Assessment: Nature versus Nurture
There is a strong movement towards alternative metrics for assessing research and researchers. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment is a terrific and eloquent argument in favor of judging the quality of the article rather than the impact … Continue reading
What do Facebook “likes” of companies mean?
You are drinking a Coke at lunch. Do you feel compelled to go to Facebook and “like” the Coca Cola facebook page? You use Matlab to process your microscopy data. Do you express your gratitude for not having to count … Continue reading
The Fake Open Access Scam
We have just enabled Lens-viewing of open access articles on PubChase, in collaboration with Ivan Grubisic1. Lens is an extraordinary step forward in visualization of research. Not only is it infinitely superior to PDFs, but it is even better than … Continue reading
Career Advice on PubChase
We are launching a “Career Advice” forum on PubChase. There is an interface to anonymously submit questions and we assembled a panel of good mentors so that a single question can have 2-3 experts replying to it. This is not … Continue reading