The Chemical Reference Resolver is an invaluable tool for quickly directing you to a publisher's webpage that contains the article you are looking for. However many of the publications are now also available on preprint servers and are accessible for free even if the final publication is behind a paywall.

To search for open access versions simply prepend your doi string with the word "oadoi" and press Enter.

Full details are in this blog post http://kovsky.net/blog/posts/oadoi-resolving.

 

With Safari 5 one of the most interesting new features is the support for Extensions and there are now many different [extensions availabl(https://safari-extensions.apple.com).

There are a section of extensions that might be of interest to scientists and I've started listing the here.

I've just created a new extension that might be of interest.

Ever come across an interesting paper that is behind a paywall? Many of these publications may also be available via green open access.

Self-archiving, also known as green open access, refers to the practice of depositing articles in an institutional repository or a subject repository such as arXiv.

However locating the open version can be a bit hit and miss given there are so many potential repositories. Fortunately oaDOI provides a simple way to search for open access versions

You can simply paste the DOI into the search engine at oadoi.org, however this web service is ideal for linking to a Safari Extension.

Read more…

Here is an interview with Matias Piipari CEO and Co-founder of Manuscriptsapp. Manuscriptsapp is a new tool for writing scientific publications it is a writing tool for scientists designed and built by scientists.

There is more information on Manuscripts on the website.

You can start writing using a manuscript template.
We supply at the time of writing 1,100 of them and are building literally thousands of them for varied uses like journals across all sciences, university specific PhD theses, grant applications).
You can outline and plan your writing project using a powerful manuscript outline that updates live as you write.
The outline helps you navigate a complex document.
It allows you to focus on a particular subsection of it when needed.
Editing has been tuned to needs of scholarly writing: clean, simple and built for purpose.
We want you to focus on your story and not twiddling how the document looks. You will not find half a dozen ribbons of nonsense like in MS Word from Manuscripts.
Top of the range citing workflow and automated bibliography formatting, either using Citations from Papers, or a built-in citation tool for which you can import references from pretty much any common format: EndNote XML, RIS, BibTeX, Citeproc JSON, MODS, and several more.
Manuscripts is not a reference manager itself, but it works with a reference manager better than other word processors or text editors.
The interface to reference management tools is built in a generic way using AppleScript, so other reference managers in addition to Papers can add support too.
On exporting a document, references are formatted for Word and exported to LaTeX.
Cross-referencable multi-panel figures, tables and equations.
Manuscripts exports figures based on the needed format, and keeps original files intact.
We export mathematical equations to both LaTeX and Word.
Import and export the key formats used for scholarly writing: MS Word, LaTeX, Markdown.
We have spent lot of effort into getting our Word export into a good shape. All content is exported, including figures, tables, equations, citations and cross-references.
Manuscripts works with Markdown and LaTeX too — it's something more powerful than a markup text editor though: you can drag in or paste markup in either these formats to produce beautiful rich text, and then export it back out as Markdown or LaTeX (or indeed HTML).
You can also drag out or or otherwise export into these markup formats as well as Word (docx) and more.
The manuscript file format is versioned.
You can revert back to older versions as needed.
We are working on the ability to merge and synchronise different versions of the document.
For those writing peer reviewed literature, we are going to allow you to directly submit your work to thousands of different journals.

 

The new beta version of Manuscripts is now out, sign up if you would like to evaluate and try it out, and particularly if you want to provide feedback.

Manuscripts is intended as an scientific/technical writing tool.

 

I've been involved in collaborations to write a couple of papers recently and when I mentioned the trials and tribulations of editing and version control when you have multiple authors someone suggested I look at Overleaf. If you are a LaTex user this looks like a very useful option, there are certainly templates for a number of chemistry journals and based on the description on the website it looks like a pretty impressive way for collaborative writing. It looks like they also support iOS.

There is a free option which would certainly be sufficient to try it out.

A reader has highlighted Authorea a web-based collaborative scientific writing tool. Authorea lets you write in LaTeX, Markdown, HTML, Javascript, and more. Different coauthors, different formats, same document. It uses Git, a robust versioning control system to keep track of document changes. A recent article written using Authorea had 200 authors form around the globe.

iBooks Author has been updated. This release brings creation of portrait-only books, embedding of custom fonts into books, a new Scrolling Sidebar and Pop-Over widgets, and also support for mathematical expressions with new native equation editing using both LaTeX and MathML notation, which could be very useful for creating science text books. iBooks Author is free for Mac OS X 10.7.4 and up and is only available in the Mac App Store.