Welcome to Gobbledygook

In his introductory post, PLoS community manager Brian Mossop talks about how PLoS Blogs came to life, and the lessons learned from other blogging networks. For me personally it all started a few weeks ago with a phone call one Friday evening from Pete Binfield, Publisher of PLoS ONE and the PLoS Community Journals.

Since August 2007 and until today I was blogging over at Nature Network. The focus of that blog was how the internet is changing scientific publishing. This is obviously a very broad topic. A lot of my blog posts looked at rather technical aspects, including new products and services (the last post was about Elsevier’s SciVerse that launched last weekend).

I will continue to write about the same topics. I particularly like to continue interviews, and I want to write more recipes (Recipe: Distributing papers for a journal club). Of course I also want to try different things, e.g. shorter blog posts of interesting stuff I find (something I currently post on Twitter). Please contact me if you have something related to scientific publishing that you want me to write about.

PLoS Blogs is not the only new science blogging network. Guardian Science Blogs launched just yesterday, and Scientopia and Science 3.0 in the last few weeks. And Scienceblogging.org, an aggregator of science blogs (to keep track of all those great blog posts), was launched by Anton Zuiker, Bora Zivkovic and Dave Munger two weeks ago.

This is a good week for science blogging for another reason. The Science Online London Conference takes place this Friday and Saturday. Most relevant to the launch of PLoS Blogs is the panel discussion Friday afternoon The state of science blogging?

There will of course be other exciting sessions. The panel “Rebooting” (aka the future of) science journalism with David Dobbs, Ed Yong, Martin Robbins, and Alice Bell should be a lot of fun. The closing panel discussion on Saturday If you build it, will they come? will look at the adoption (or lack thereof) of  Web 2.0 tools for scholarly communication, based on a recent report by the Research Information Network. And a number of sessions focus on open data, a trending topic I’m personally very interested in. Together with Geoff Bilder and Gudmundur Thorisson I will moderate a session ORCID as unique author identifier: what is it good for and should we worry or be happy?

Most importantly, Science Online London is a great opportunity to meet many of my fellow science bloggers in person, including Brian Mossop, the PLoS Blogs community manager. Expect more reports from Science Online London in the next few days, for more up-to-date information please follow me on Twitter (@mfenner, conference hashtag #solo10) or try the video stream put together by Graham Steel.