On Wednesday the Scratchpad team as part of the ViBRANT project had a planning meeting to discuss development priorities for the coming year. More detail will be provided in the coming days once the meeting report is finalised, but in the mean time here are the key decisions:

For those of you who were unable to access the Scratchpad server this morning or yesterday evening (5/6 July 2010 BST), we can only offer our apologies and say that we're looking into the issue. It looks like the issue is likely to be as a result of a large volume of traffic from Yahoo!'s spiders. These have been blocked for now, which we will hopefully review in the near future.

Written by Stephan Imhof

For those of us who do not use Endnote as the software for reference management, Scratchpads offer three more data formats for importing bibliographic data. For me, the RIS-format turned out to be the less complicated. Many bibliographic software has features to facilitate the export of content via this format.

At long last we (the Scratchpad team) have got around to publishing a formal paper on the Scratchpads. There are several short notes and conference proceedings published about the work we have been doing, but this is the first technical paper that describes in details the overall architecture of the project and sets out the sociological model of what we are trying to achieve. The paper will appear as one of nine papers selected for a special series sponsored by the Encyclopedia of Life project, for the journal BMC Bioinformatics. BMC, with the help of the special issue editor Neil Sarkar, selected the Scratchpad paper to highlight the publication in a press release entitled "Darwin meets Facebook". You can find a copy of the press release attached to the bottom of this page.

Unfortunately our paper is already slightly out of date! Written in April in the run up to the eBiosphere 09 meeting, the text describes the technical architecture then, rather than now. Drupal (the underlying content management system that provides the backbone architecture) has moved on since April 09, as have many of the contributed modules we use in the Scratchpads, and the 25+ modules we have written as part of the project. Nevertheless, the paper provides the best description to date of what we are doing, and (to some extent) where we are going with this project.

The citation is:

Vincent S Smith, Simon D Rycroft, Kehan T Harman, Ben Scott and David Roberts. 2009. Scratchpads: a data-publishing framework to build, share and manage information on the diversity of life. BMC Bioinformatics 2009, 10(Suppl 14):S6doi:10.1186/1471-2105-10-S14-S6.

The paper will be published on or around November 10th 2009, and the press release will be available here from Nov. 6th. Press queries should go through Claire Gilby, Senior Press Officer, Natural History Museum in the first instance. Tel: 020 7942 5106. Email: c.gilby@nhm.ac.uk.