RSS in the Academic/Research/Scientific community
I recently wondered out loud (on a couple of mailing lists) how much action there is with RSS and Blogging within the Academic/Research/Scientific community.
The reason for that question was that I was considering that with those folks refereed, scholarly articles are what counts which seems diametrically opposite to the casual, ad-hoc, first-person rants that are generally associated with blogging. (Ok I am just exaggerating to make a point.)
I learned that there's actually lots and lots going on with RSS and Blogging in that world. Here are some interesting from a more or less random collection of serious science and academic pubs all of which have RSS support of some kind. This is, I am sure, nowhere near comprehensive, but it was eye opening to me.,
- Generate RSS feeds for search alerts from databases hosted on EngineeringVillage2
- Generate RSS feeds for search alerts from ADS (astro and planetary science)
- IEEE Computer Society (warning: if you're at an institution that uses Xplore -- the feed does not link through to full text and you'll have to search)
- EurekAlert! (ok, only press releases from Universities and research institutions, but still very much of interest to practicing scientists and engineers)
- Science
- Acta Crystallographica
- Lots of trade pubs like The Engineer, Small Times, New Scientist, Advances in Electronics Manufacturing Technology have RSS feeds. Just google their name with RSS
- Pubmed lets you create standing searches as RSS Feeds. Here are the instructions.
- Association for Computing Machinery Queue Magazine
- IOP
- APS
- ACS Nanofocus
- Nature
- BioMed Central
- Also check out Connotea, a de.icio.us like service focused on the scientific and academic community.
- Just look at this list, it's awesome!
Pretty cool, eh?
Comments
Edu_RSS
http://www.downes.ca/xml/edu_rss.htm
Posted by: Stephen Downes | July 26, 2005 11:43 AM
The main application of RSS in scientific research is still aggregating links to traditional articles or press releases. And even there the vast majority of RSS feeds in scientific research are either not configurable or simply not available. Things could get much more interesting if scientists started to publish directly to blogs with the same level of scientific rigor that they do in traditional publications. One of the big issues there is the role of peer review. I would like to see more discussion on this topic and have more thoughts here:
http://drexel-coas-elearning.blogspot.com/2005/07/peer-review-and-supported-documents.html
Posted by: Jean-Claude Bradley | July 26, 2005 03:02 PM
The main application of RSS in scientific research is still aggregating links to traditional articles or press releases. And even there the vast majority of RSS feeds in scientific research are either not configurable or simply not available. Things could get much more interesting if scientists started to publish directly to blogs with the same level of scientific rigor that they do in traditional publications. One of the big issues there is the role of peer review. I would like to see more discussion on this topic and have more thoughts here:
http://drexel-coas-elearning.blogspot.com/2005/07/peer-review-and-supported-documents.html
Posted by: Jean-Claude Bradley | July 26, 2005 03:02 PM
The main application of RSS in scientific research is still aggregating links to traditional articles or press releases. And even there the vast majority of RSS feeds in scientific research are either not configurable or simply not available. Things could get much more interesting if scientists started to publish directly to blogs with the same level of scientific rigor that they do in traditional publications. One of the big issues there is the role of peer review. I would like to see more discussion on this topic and have more thoughts here:
http://drexel-coas-elearning.blogspot.com/2005/07/peer-review-and-supported-documents.html
Posted by: Jean-Claude Bradley | July 26, 2005 03:02 PM
Nice summary!
Last December my Nature colleagues and I published a paper in D-Lib Magazine summarising RSS activity among science publishers. It also describes work that we and others have done to provide RSS feeds with rich bibliographic metadata, and to create customised aggregations of feeds:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/december2004-hammond
For a fuller list of Nature RSS feeds than that provided at the link above, see:
http://www.nature.com/rss
Also, for a nifty scientific application of RSS, check out CML-RSS, a way of carrying chemical data in RSS feeds:
http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/moin/CmlRss
Posted by: Timo Hannay | July 27, 2005 09:47 AM
Nice work Pito! It's also worth noting that scientific publisher's are thinking of other ways to use RSS other than just Table of Contents alerts. See this entry of mine recently for example:
http://atgdev.elsevier.com/blogs/cleonard/?p=6
There are many other things we could do, but this is just an example.
Posted by: Computing Chris | July 30, 2005 05:18 AM
When you quoted my e-mail, you probably should have removed this part: "this includes Compendex for us but for other institutions covers Inspec and NTIS, too." :)
Posted by: Christina Pikas | August 1, 2005 01:05 PM