A UK Parliamentary committee is undertaking a science communication inquiry. The deadline for written submissions is Friday 29th April 2016. There are also Parliamentary inquiries ongoing into A.I., Big Data, regulation of the Life Sciences, the UK science budget, and ‘science in emergencies’.

UNITE, a unified search engine for fungi species.

The long lead story in the latest edition of The Atlantic seems to vindicate my choice of topic for the first JURN donationware magazine template. My magazine template provides a ready-made vehicle for a large American town intent on reviving itself and hauling itself up by its own bootstraps, a print vehicle potentially able to reach residents who live far outside the orbit of things like social media and fast broadband.

The Atlantic article is certainly not PrairyErth in either depth or lyricism, but “How America Is Putting Itself Back Together” makes for an interesting long read and is full of fresh facts…

“Most people in the U.S. believe their country is going to hell. But they’re wrong. What a three-year journey by single-engine plane reveals about reinvention and renewal.”

JANE. Paste in the abstract from your unpublished biomedical paper, and JANE will suggest which Medline-indexed journal your paper should be submitted to.

Research Data Australia. Including over 250 PDF monographs in the Australia Bureau of Mineral Resources Bulletin series, all under CC-Attribution. It’s possible there are more series, but the Web connection to Australia from the UK died before I could investigate further.

Facebook continues to slowly roll out various parts of Facebook for Business. Instant Articles is to be launched next, and is being pitched as…

“A new way for publishers to create fast, interactive articles on Facebook … articles load instantly, as much as 10 times faster than the standard mobile Web … Instantly zoom into high-resolution photos and tilt to explore in detail. Watch autoplay video … as you scroll through the article. See where it all happened with interactive maps. Hear the author’s voice with embedded audio captions.”

Also “sign-up to the newsletter” or “book now” buttons.

“On April 12th at Facebook’s F8 conference, we will open up the Instant Articles program to all publishers — of any size, anywhere in the world.”

There’s already a Simple Facebook Instant Articles — WordPress Plugin…

“Add support for Facebook Instant Articles to your WordPress site. This plugin creates a new articles endpoint, and a feed to give to Facebook with links to those articles.”

I’m not sure if this also has FB-tailored widgets for zoom-able photos, video and audio, maps, buttons that interface with MailChimp and Eventbrite. But anyone with a standalone WordPress install can get such widgets. Might be interesting to also create a sister plugin that helps to format bits of an academic article into a one-page Instant Article (abstract + the gist of the conclusion + a picture + plain English suggestions + auto Wikipedia-linking of recognised phrases).

The Wall Street Journal reported…

“Publishers are entitled to 100% of revenue generated from ads in Instant Articles, provided they sell and serve the ads themselves. Publishers keep a 70% cut if they’d rather have Facebook sell ads on their behalf through its mobile ad network, the Facebook Audience Network.”

I suspect we’ll see a Pinterest-isation of the articles ‘post cards’ for desktop and tablet users, outside of the users’s Facebook streams, once they’re established…

It’s unknown if publisher ad-blocker blockers will be tolerated in articles or not. I’d guess that Facebook’s terms will forbid publishers from gunking up their FB Articles with scripts of that type, or the whole thing would turn into a Wild West and Facebook could also be the target of a lot of user negativity. Hopefully Instant Articles will also be free of annoying slide-ins and page-blocking “Give us your email address!” and “Agree to our use of cookies!” overlays.

Personally I’ll continue to fling longer articles to Instapaper and read them on the Amazon Kindle eReader. I presume that Instapaper will work with the new Facebook Instant Articles, as it does with other articles.

protocols.io…

“An up-to-date open access repository of science methods … Save time and increase the reproducibility of your research…”

“Reducing noise in the academic library: The effectiveness of installing noise meters” ($) in the paywalled Library Hi Tech. The paper…

“explore[s] the effect of an electronic [light-up] noise-monitoring device (NoiseSign) at reducing noise levels in quiet study areas in an academic library.”

Perhaps their NoiseSign could also trigger a powerful signal-blocker that would block all phone connections within 50 feet for thirty minutes. The resulting peer-pressure on talkative teens could be enormous.

JISC R&D’s Research Data Discovery Service search (alpha).