f1000

February 11, 2011 at 12:10 pm | | literature, science community, stupid technology, wild web

UPDATE2: OK, it turns out that the daily(ish) email isn’t too terrible. I now use it and I’m no longer upset that they don’t have an RSS feed. I correct myself and now fully endorse F1000!

Faculty of 1000 is extremely powerful with a lot of potential, but simultaneously completely worthless.

F1000 is like mini-peer-review post-publishing: it uses its “Faculty,” experts in various fields, to rate publications that those experts think are worth reading. It’s like … nay, it is … getting suggestions on what to read in the recent literature from a large group of experts. That is very cool. Of course, there are various databases like Cite-U-Like and Mendeley that are trying to mine their data to find interesting papers, but there’s something great about getting little mini-reviews from actual people.

OK, so why am I annoyed? F1000 doesn’t have an RSS feed! So I have to remember to go and check the website every week. Even if I happen to remember, there’s no way to mark which reviews I’ve already seen and the new ones. What is this, 2002?

UPDATE: rpg comments below with some good news: F1000 is actively trying to get RSS on the site. The comments also explain why it’s a challenge. I eagerly await RSS.

7 Comments »

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  1. It’s not an ideal solution in this case, but ChangeDetection could still be useful. You might need to create an account to use the feed-of-changes functionality.

    Comment by Steven N. Severinghaus — February 11, 2011 #

  2. I feel your pain. I ran the F1000 website redesign project for the best part of a year, and was pretty insistent on getting RSS feeds for dynamic pages. Problem is that it’s a subscription service, sowe don’t want to give everything away for free, and there’s still some issues to sort out there.

    Having said that, I think an up-coming update should have at least some RSS goodness included.

    Comment by r — February 14, 2011 #

  3. Thanks for posting that, Sam. (Previous comment was by me)

    Comment by rpg — February 14, 2011 #

  4. rpg, almost all journals are subscription services, and they all have rss feeds of article titles. i don’t really understand how that could possibly a problem. i think it’s very silly thinking by f1000. but i’m glad to hear that someone on the inside is pushing for rss.

    Comment by sam — February 14, 2011 #

  5. The problem, Sam, is that the article titles are a big part of the business. You don’t get a great deal of useful information from a journal article title in the journal itself: but you *do* get useful information just knowing an article has been evaluated by F1000 (based on user feedback–I’m not just making this up). In fact it’s all a lot of customers want to see.

    There are other considerations too. There could be 70-80 articles daily from the entire site, which is a huge amount of information. You’d be wanting to filter by area of interest, or search terms, and you can get notification of these by email. Personally, I’d like to see them in the RSS it’s not a simple matter given what I’ve said about this–and yes, there has been a lot of thought and discussion about it.

    Comment by rpg — February 15, 2011 #

  6. There’s a ‘but’ missing in the above :)

    Comment by rpg — February 15, 2011 #

  7. that’s a very good point, rpg. i hadn’t really thought of that. glad they’re thinking about this at f1000. when i contacted them about rss, their response didn’t indicate that they had any interest in bringing rss to the site. i’ll see if the email alerts are tolerable. ;)

    Comment by sam — February 15, 2011 #

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