O'Really?

January 18, 2013

How to export, delete and move your Mendeley account and library #mendelete

Filed under: publishing,Science,technology — Duncan Hull @ 1:00 pm
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Deleteme

Delete. Creative Commons licensed picture by Vitor Sá – Virgu via Flickr.com

News that Reed Elsevier is in talks to buy Mendeley.com will have many scientists reaching for their “delete account” button. Mendeley has built an impressive user-base of scientists and other academics since they started, but the possibility of an Elsevier takeover has worried some of its users. Elsevier has a strained relationship with some groups in the scientific community [1,2], so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

If you’ve built a personal library of scientific papers in Mendeley, you won’t just want to delete all the data, you’ll need to export your library first, delete your account and then import it into a different tool.

Disclaimer: I’m not advocating that you delete your mendeley account (aka #mendelete), just that if you do decide to, here’s how to do it, and some alternatives to consider. Update April 2013, it wasn’t just a rumour.

Exporting your Mendeley library

Open up Mendeley Desktop, on the File menu select Export. You have a choice of three export formats:

  1. BibTeX (*.bib)
  2. RIS – Research Information Systems (*.ris)
  3. EndNote XML (*.xml)

It is probably best to create a backup in all three formats just in case as this will give you more options for importing into whatever you replace Mendeley with. Another possibility is to use the Mendeley API to export your data which will give you more control over how and what you export, or trawl through the Mendeley forums for alternatives. [update: see also comments below from William Gunn on exporting via your local SQLite cache]

Deleting your Mendeley account #mendelete

Login to Mendeley.com, click on the My Account button (top right), Select Account details from the drop down menu and scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the link delete your account. You’ll be see a message We’re sorry you want to go, but if you must… which you can either cancel or select Delete my account and all my data. [update] To completely delete your account you’ll need to send an email to privacy at mendeley dot com. (Thanks P.Chris for pointing this out in the comments below)

Alternatives to Mendeley

Once you have exported your data, you’ll need an alternative to import your data into. Fortunately, there are quite a few to choose from [3], some of which are shown in the list below. This is not a comprehensive list, so please add suggestions below in the comments if I missed any obvious ones. Wikipedia has an extensive article which compares all the different reference management software which is quite handy (if slightly bewildering). Otherwise you might consider trying the following software:

One last alternative, if you are fed up with trying to manage all those clunky pdf files, you could just switch to Google Scholar which is getting better all the time. If you decide that Mendeley isn’t your cup of tea, now might be a good time to investigate some alternatives, there are plenty of good candidates to choose from. But beware, you may run from the arms of one large publisher (Elsevier) into the arms of another (Springer or Macmillan which own Papers and ReadCube respectively).

References

  1. Whitfield, J. (2012). Elsevier boycott gathers pace Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature.2012.10010
  2. Van Noorden, R. (2013). Mathematicians aim to take publishers out of publishing Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature.2013.12243
  3. Hull, D., Pettifer, S., & Kell, D. (2008). Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web PLoS Computational Biology, 4 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204
  4. Attwood, T., Kell, D., McDermott, P., Marsh, J., Pettifer, S., & Thorne, D. (2010). Utopia documents: linking scholarly literature with research data Bioinformatics, 26 (18) DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btq383

May 11, 2012

Journal Fire: Bonfire of the Vanity Journals?

Filed under: engineering,informatics,publishing,Science — Duncan Hull @ 1:15 pm
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Fire by John Curley on Flickr

Fire by John Curley, available via Creative Commons license.

When I first heard about Journal Fire, I thought, Great! someone is going to take all the closed-access scientific journals and make a big bonfire of them! At the top of this bonfire would be the burning effigy of a wicker man, representing the very worst of the vanity journals [1,2].

Unfortunately Journal Fire aren’t burning anything just yet, but what they are doing is something just as interesting. Their web based application allows you to manage and share your journal club online. I thought I’d give it a whirl because a friend of mine asked me what I thought about a paper on ontologies in biodiversity [3]. Rather than post a brief review here, I’ve posted it over at Journal Fire. Here’s some initial thoughts on a quick test drive of their application:

Pros

On the up side Journal Fire:

  • Is a neutral-ish third party space where anyone can discuss scientific papers.
  • Understands common identifiers (DOI and PMID) to tackle the identity crisis.
  • Allows you to post simple anchor links in reviews, but not much else, see below.
  • Does not require you to use cumbersome syntax used in ResearchBlogging [4], ScienceSeeker and elsewhere
  • Is integrated with citeulike, for those that use it
  • It can potentially provide many different reviews of a given paper in one place
  • Is web-based, so you don’t have to download and install any software, unlike alternative desktop systems Mendeley and Utopia docs

Cons

On the down side Journal Fire:

  • Is yet another piece social software for scientists. Do we really need more, when we’ve had far too many already?
  • Requires you to sign up for an account without  re-using your existing digital identity with Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.
  • Does not seem to have many people on it (yet) despite the fact it has been going since at least since 2007.
  • Looks a bit stale, the last blog post was published in 2010. Although the software still works fine, it is not clear if it is being actively maintained and developed.
  • Does not allow much formatting in reviews besides simple links, something like markdown would be good.
  • Does not understand or import arXiv identifiers, at the moment.
  • As far as I can see, Journal Fire is a small startup based in Pasadena, California. Like all startups, they might go bust. If this happens, they’ll take your journal club, and all its reviews down with them.

I think the pros mostly outweigh the cons, so if you like the idea of a third-party hosting your journal club, Journal Fire is worth a trial run.

References

  1. Juan Carlos Lopez (2009) We want your paper! The similarity between high-end restaurants and scientific journals Spoonful of Medicine, a blog from Nature Medicine
  2. NOTE: Vanity journals should not to be confused with the The Vanity Press.
  3. Andrew R. Deans, Matthew J. Yoder & James P. Balhoff (2012). Time to change how we describe biodiversity, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 27 (2) 84. DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2011.11.007
  4. Shema, H., Bar-Ilan, J., & Thelwall, M. (2012). Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information PLoS ONE, 7 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0035869

December 11, 2009

The Semantic Biochemical Journal experiment

Filed under: publishing,semweb — Duncan Hull @ 12:18 am
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utopian documentsThere is an interesting review [1] (and special issue) in the Biochemical Journal today, published by Portland Press Ltd. It provides (quote) “a whirlwind tour of recent projects to transform scholarly publishing paradigms, culminating in Utopia and the Semantic Biochemical Journal experiment”. Here is a quick outline of the publishing projects the review describes and discusses:

  • Blogs for biomedical science
  • Biomedical Ontologies – OBO etc
  • Project Prospect and the Royal Society of Chemistry
  • The Chemspider Journal of Chemistry
  • The FEBS Letters experiment
  • PubMedCentral and BioLit [2]
  • Public Library of Science (PLoS) Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD) [3]
  • The Elsevier Grand Challenge [4]
  • Liquid Publications
  • The PDF debate: Is PDF a hamburger? Or can we build more useful applications on top of it?
  • The Semantic Biochemical Journal project with Utopia Documents [5]

The review asks what advances these projects have made  and what obstacles to progress still exist. It’s an entertaining tour, dotted with enlightening observations on what is broken in scientific publishing and some of the solutions involving various kinds of semantics.

One conclusion made is that many of the experiments described above are expensive and difficult, but that the costs of not improving scientific publishing with various kinds of semantic markup is high, or as the authors put it:

“If the cost of semantic publishing seems high, then we also need to ask, what is the price of not doing it? From the results of the experiments we have seen to date, there is clearly a need to move forward and still a great deal of scope to innovate. If we fail to move forward in a collaborative way, if we fail to engage the key players, the price will be high. We will continue to bury scientific knowledge, as we routinely do now, in static, unconnected journal articles; to sequester fragments of that knowledge in disparate databases that are largely inaccessible from journal pages; to further waste countless hours of scientists’ time either repeating experiments they didn’t know had been performed before, or worse, trying to verify facts they didn’t know had been shown to be false. In short, we will continue to fail to get the most from our literature, we will continue to fail to know what we know, and will continue to do science a considerable disservice.”

It’s well worth reading the review, and downloading the Utopia software to experience all of the interactive features demonstrated in this special issue, especially the animated molecular viewers and sequence alignments.

Enjoy… the Utopia team would be interested to know what people think, see commentary on friendfeed,  the digital curation blog and youtube video below for more information.

References

  1. Attwood, T., Kell, D., McDermott, P., Marsh, J., Pettifer, S., & Thorne, D. (2009). Calling International Rescue: knowledge lost in literature and data landslide! Biochemical Journal, 424 (3), 317-333 DOI: 10.1042/BJ20091474
  2. Fink, J., Kushch, S., Williams, P., & Bourne, P. (2008). BioLit: integrating biological literature with databases Nucleic Acids Research, 36 (Web Server) DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkn317
  3. Shotton, D., Portwin, K., Klyne, G., & Miles, A. (2009). Adventures in Semantic Publishing: Exemplar Semantic Enhancements of a Research Article PLoS Computational Biology, 5 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000361
  4. Pafilis, E., O’Donoghue, S., Jensen, L., Horn, H., Kuhn, M., Brown, N., & Schneider, R. (2009). Reflect: augmented browsing for the life scientist Nature Biotechnology, 27 (6), 508-510 DOI: 10.1038/nbt0609-508
  5. Pettifer, S., Thorne, D., McDermott, P., Marsh, J., Villéger, A., Kell, D., & Attwood, T. (2009). Visualising biological data: a semantic approach to tool and database integration BMC Bioinformatics, 10 (Suppl 6) DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-10-S6-S19

May 19, 2009

Defrosting the John Rylands University Library

Filed under: seminars — Duncan Hull @ 4:14 pm
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http://www.flickr.com/photos/dpicker/3107856991/For anyone who missed the original bioinformatics seminar I’ll be doing a repeat of the “Defrosting the Digital Library” talk, this time for the staff in the John Rylands University Library (JRUL) . This is the main academic library in Manchester with (quote) “more than 4 million printed books and manuscripts, over 41,000 electronic journals and 500,000 electronic books, as well as several hundred databases, the John Rylands University Library is one of the best-resourced academic libraries in the country.” The journal subscription budget of the library is currently around £4 million per year, that’s before they’ve even bought any books! Here is the abstract for the talk:

After centuries with little change, scientific libraries have recently experienced massive upheaval. From being almost entirely paper-based, most libraries are now almost completely digital. This information revolution has all happened in less than 20 years and has created many novel opportunities and threats for scientists, publishers and libraries.

Today, we are struggling with an embarrassing wealth of digital knowledge on the Web. Most scientists access this knowledge through some kind of digital library, however these places can be cold, impersonal, isolated, and inaccessible places. Many libraries are still clinging to obsolete models of identity, attribution, contribution, citation and publication.

Based on a review published in PLoS Computational Biology, pubmed.gov/18974831 this talk will discuss the current chilly state of digital libraries for biologists, chemists and informaticians, including PubMed and Google Scholar. We highlight problems and solutions to the coupling and decoupling of publication data and metadata, with a tool called citeulike.org. This software tool (and many other tools just like it) exploit the Web to make digital libraries “warmer”: more personal, sociable, integrated, and accessible places.

Finally issues that will help or hinder the continued warming of libraries in the future, particularly the accurate identity of authors and their publications, are briefly introduced. These are discussed in the context of the BBSRC funded REFINE project, at the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM.ac.uk), which is linking biochemical pathway data with evidence for pathways from the PubMed database.

Date: Thursday 21st May 2009, Time: 13.00, Location: John Rylands University (Main) Library Oxford Road, Parkinson Room (inside main entrance, first on right) University of Manchester (number 55 on google map of the Manchester campus). Please come along if you are interested…

References

  1. Hull, D., Pettifer, S., & Kell, D. (2008). Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web PLoS Computational Biology, 4 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204

[CC licensed picture above, the John Rylands Library on Deansgate by dpicker: David Picker]

November 24, 2008

Embracing Registries of Web Services

Filed under: informatics,web of science — Duncan Hull @ 2:00 pm
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Embracing by tanakwhoIf you travel back in time, to around 2002, it isn’t difficult to find people claiming that Web services were going to be the new silver bullet technology to create world peace, eradicate global poverty and finally make some sense of all the data produced by the human genome project. Over hyped? Just a bit. One of the many reasons none of these things happened, is it turned out to be much harder than anticipated to build centralised registries, where people could go to find Web services to perform a given task. Can service registries ever be built? Critics like Tim Bray at Sun Microsystems for example, have suggested that (quote) “registries are a fantasy”, but some already exist and there are more in the pipeline. This article briefly introduces some of them: Seekda, BioMOBY, the Embrace service registry and the Biocatalogue project. (more…)

March 30, 2007

This month’s molecule is…

Filed under: biotech — Duncan Hull @ 10:10 pm
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Space-filling and backbone model of 1HRYThere are a number of “Molecule of the Month” style mini-reviews on the web, which highlight one particular molecule (usually a protein) every month, in an accessible style. Two of my personal favourites are protein spotlight: one month, one protein written by Vivienne Baillie Gerritsen of the Swiss-Prot team and Molecule of the Month at the Protein Databank PDB edited by David Goodsell. Both these features are worth a quick read because they can help bio-literate and bio-curious users to increase and reinforce their knowledge relatively quickly.

Part of what makes the PDB one worth reading is the colourful visualisations and short descriptions that go with it. For March 2007, PDBs molecule of the month is Zinc Fingers. Meanwhile, over at swissprot, the molecule is Sex-determining region Y protein (Sry), used to illustrate the tenuous nature of sex.

[This post originally published on nodalpoint with comments]

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