The Scientific Activist

If you've gone to ResearchBlogging.org lately, you may have noticed that it's been given a face-lift. Actually, it's more than just a face-lift, as cofounder and president Dave Munger points out, including these new features:

• Multiple language support (and 30 new German-language bloggers!)
• Topic-specific RSS feeds
• Post-by-post tagging with topics and subtopics
• "Recover password" feature
• Email alerts when there is a problem with posts
• Users can flag posts that don't meet our guidelines
• Customized user home pages with bios and blog descriptions
• Blogger photos/other images displayed with each post
• Multiple bloggers per blog
• Multiple blogs per blogger
• Advanced troubleshooting features

(Munger also points out to returning users that "all passwords have been reset, so you'll need to use the "forgot password?" link to set your password.")

If you're not familiar with ResearchBlogging.org, it's a central repository for blog posts about peer-reviewed research, and it allows registered users to self-identify posts about peer-reviewed research with an instantly-recognizable icon. It also includes a very useful citation generator (and ResearchBlogging.org uses code embedded within this citation to automatically detect posts to be aggregated on the site). In fact, ResearchBlogging.org is a great model for how blogs can effectively interact with the scientific establishment, and such initiatives could potentially pave the way for a deeper and more extensive integration of blogs within academic culture in the future.

I've been using ResearchBlogging.org since it first went online within the last year (you can see my profile and aggregated posts here), and if you also write about peer-reviewed research, I'd encourage you to sign up here.