Online Journal Club on Flexible Electronics

For many years, people accumulate personal collections of academic publications of interest in paper form. As such collections grow with time, more file cabinets and book shelves are needed for storage. First, space becomes a problem. Second, finding a specific paper could be a headache, even if the collections are well categorized.

As more and more publications become available online in recent years, people gradually switch to collect electronic versions, e.g. PDF files of papers. These files are often stored in local hard drives. Space is not an issue anymore. But again, locating a paper from hundreds of files in tens of folders still might be a heck of efforts.

Besides the difficulty in searching, other common shortcomings include:

• Locally stored, limited access flexibility.
• Personally owned, not easy to share with other people. As a result, the scale of personal collections is often limited.
• Redundently collected. Consider this: a same gem paper is manually archived by thousands of people individually.
• Statically and passively maintained. Lack of interactions among people sharing common interests.

Any better idea? Here comes Web2.0, which is all about online collaboration. Among the numerous tools enabled by Web2.0, CiteULike could be the one able to solve the above issues for us. A previous post in AMN explored the possibility to form online journal club based on CiteULike. Here is an example.

Launched by www.macroelectronics.org, the Macroelectronics Journal Club focuses on the scientific publications related to flexible electronics, ranging from enabling technologies to fundamental sciences. Major features include:

• All publication information stored online;
• Free access to anyone and from anywhere with internet connection;
• Once posted by someone, the item is open to everyone. No waste of labor and time;
• Easy to discuss papers and share views among members;
• Locating a paper can be as easy as a couple of clicks away;
• RSS feed to keep you current with the latest updates.

For more details of the Macroelectronics Journal Club, visit www.macroelectronics.org.

Everyone is welcome to join. So give it a try and let's explore better ways to manage academic literature and conduct scientific research.

(via www.macroelectronics.org)

Update: (14 July 2006)
By default, CiteULike stores links to papers. To get full access of a paper, you often need to locate the paper within the subscription of your institution, instead of its original link. By using a scalable bookmarklet, now localizing the paper links can be only as easy as one click away. See a recent AMN entry for details.