All Science needs a Front Matter

Coming soon.

Learn More
Contact Us

Categories

Front Matter accepts contributions in one of these categories.

  • News

    Science news of interest to Front Matter readers.

  • Meeting Report

    Reports from conferences and workshops of interest to the scientific community.

  • Feature

    Features explore issues raised by news stories in more depth.

  • Perspective

    Perspectives address relevant and/or controversial science-related issues.

  • Digest

    Digests highlight important published research.

  • Interview

    Interviews with interesting people in science and science communication.

  • Chart

    Visualizations that help explain science, and tips on how to create and interpret them.

  • Science Hack

    Tips that are making the daily life of a scientist easier.

  • Book Review

    Reviews of fiction and non-fiction books about science.

From the Archives

feature

Blogging Beyond Jekyll

This blog has been on four different platforms since starting in 2007: a custom blogging engine and then Movable Type on Nature Network 2007-2010, Wordpress on the PLOS Blogs Network 2010-2013, and the static blogging engine Jekyll hosted on Github Pages since 2013....

Martin Fenner
March 23, 2015 • 3 min read

feature

First analysis of software metrics

Last week I wrote about software.lagotto.io, an instance of the lagotto open source software collecting metrics for the about 1,400 software repositories included in Sciencetoolbox. In this post I want to report the first results analyzing the data.Number of software repositories (out of 1,404)...

Martin Fenner
February 28, 2015 • 3 min read

science hack

Using Microsoft Word with git

One of the major challenges of writing a journal article is to keep track of versions - both the different versions you create as the document progresses, and to merge in the changes made by your collaborators. For most academics Microsoft Word is the default writing tool,...

Martin Fenner
August 25, 2014 • 3 min read

meeting report

Build Roads not Stagecoaches

I attended the Open Knowledge Festival this week and I had a blast. For three days (I also attended the fringe event csv,conf on Tuesday) I listed to wonderful presentations and was involved in great discussions - both within sessions,...

Martin Fenner
July 18, 2014 • 3 min read

book review

Book Review: Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen

Reinventing Discovery, the book by Michael Nielsen we all have been waiting for, has finally been published on Friday. Today I flew to Boston for the Microsoft Research eScience Workshop: Transforming Scholarly Communication,...

Martin Fenner
October 22, 2011 • 1 min read

digest

Increased cancer risk following computed tomography scans

Two papers (this and this) and an editorial in the latest issue of Archives of Internal Medicine examine the cancer risks associated with the use of computed tomography (CT) examinations.1Ionizing radiation increases the risk for developing cancer....

Martin Fenner
December 20, 2009 • 3 min read

interview

Interview with Geoffrey Bilder

Almost exactly two years ago, CrossRef invited a number of people to discuss unique identifiers for researchers (CrossRef Author ID meeting). One year ago Thomson Reuters launched ResearcherID...

Martin Fenner
February 17, 2009 • 16 min read