Science media company Seed Media Group, US, has announced the launch of several new initiatives and innovations in scientific communication. Seed CEO Adam Bly launched these initiatives during the recently concluded Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Annual Meeting in Baltimore, MD. Among the new initiatives are: A new Information Science channel on ScienceBlogs for the 10,000 librarians who regularly visit the site; the new release of ResearchBlogging; and RB Connect, a new service for scientific publishers.
A new Information Science channel launched on ScienceBlogs will feature several prominent librarian-bloggers and information scientists. The channel will focus on open access and open science, digital and print publishing, intellectual property and ownership, data visualisation, and other revolutions in information science.
A preview of the ResearchBlogging software was also made to SSP attendees. The software from Seed Technology connects scientific papers to scientific blogs, enabling researchers to make use of information about current science in the blogosphere. The new release of ResearchBlogging includes support for citation data from ArXiv and PubMed, and streamlined citation generation.
RB Connect, a new service that enables scientific publishers to link articles to aggregated blog posts from ResearchBlogging, was also launched. RB Connect will be launched on the websites of PLoS One from the Public Library of Science, the pioneering open access publisher, and the Royal Society, the prestigious British scientific society and publisher.
Seed Media's portfolio spans magazines, online and social media. It formed ScienceBlogs in an alliance with German magazine publisher Hubert Burda Media in September 2007. ScienceBlogs is claimed to be the largest blogging network dedicated to science.
