Force11 is a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that has arisen organically to help facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing. Individually and collectively, we aim to bring about a change in modern scholarly communications through the effective use of information technology. [About Force 11]

Rather than the presentations, I would say that the most valuable aspect of this event are the many conversations you can have with people from different backgrounds: techies, publishers, policy makers, academics etc..

Nonetheless, here’s a (very short and biased) list of things that seemed to stand out.

This presentation describes my recent work in semantic analysis of the acknowledgement section of biomedical research articles, specifically the sharing of resources (instruments, reagents, model organisms, etc.) between the author articles and other non-author investigators. The resulting semantic graph complements the knowledge currently captured by research profiling systems, which primarily focus on investigators, publications and grants. My approach results in much finer-grained information, at the individual author contribution level, and the specific resources shared by external parties. The long-term goal for this work is unification with the VIVO-ISF-based CTSAsearch federated search engine, which currently contains research profiles from 60 institutions worldwide.

I argue that it is precisely the ubiquitous use of attachments that has held up progress in publishing. We have the technology right now to allow the author to write online and have the file saved automatically as XML. All subsequent work on the “manuscript” (e.g. copy editing, QC, etc) can also be done online. At the end of the process the XML is automatically “rendered” to PDF, Epub, etc, and delivered to the end user, on demand. This system is quicker as there are no emails or attachments to hold it up, cheaper as there is no admin involved, and more accurate as there is only one definitive file (the XML) which is the “format of record”.

If you want more, it’s worth taking a look directly at the conference agenda and in particular the demo/poster session agenda. And hopefully see you next year in Portland, Oregon :-)

I thought that was a simple thing to do; nope! Spent quite some time looking for the right piece of software. Here’s my experience:

1. The False Friends

Adobe Reader. It does say only ‘reader’ but since you can see the metadata so easily, I thought Adobe would have let us edit them too. No way..

Itunes. I didn’t know that, but yes it does open and catalogue your pdf files too. And it makes you think that you can edit some sort ‘metadata’ when you press apple+I.. however, these are just iTunes metadata. The pdf ones (which are embedded in the pdf file) won’t be touched. So iTunes is not good too.

PDF Meta Edit. I did a bit of googling and found this free little app, but it looked like my operating system didn’t like it (fyi, I’m running Snow Leopard).

2. The Lifesaving Friends

PDF-Meta. A small project hosted on googleCode. It’s a simple java application, not particularly nice-looking but it does the job perfectly (and since it’s java you’ve got more chances it’ll work also on other operating systems).

PDFInfo. Another small free app that does the job. This is OSx specific though, but it gives you control over a few more options compared to PDF-Meta.

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That’s all I could find online… if you know of other solutions that work on OSx, please speak up!

Docs in CHM and PDF formats: http://charupload.wordpress.com/2007/12/02/django-documentation-chm/

Docs as a django application: http://smileychris.tactful.co.nz/ramblings/django-documentation/ (see the screenshot below)

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