Ewan Birney reflects on the use of twitter and blogging for science communication [Link] →

Worth reading. Ewan includes some comments regarding the growing use of pre-print platforms:

Blogging is nice, because it is accessible to a broader audience and allows for a more chatty, 'natural language' style – but if the main purpose is to communicate with scientists, pre-publication servers are a better way to go

Ewan singles out arXiv, bioRxiv, and F1000Research, but I think PeerJ are also worth a mention here. They also have their own pre-print server and they also encourage open peer review.

Additionally, I think figshare is another outlet that can be used for dissemination of science material that may not suitable for a peer reviewed publication. One cool thing about using figshare for posting preliminary data or commentary pieces is that articles are allocated a DataCite DOI and can therefore be cited.

Which 'omics' assembly tools are currently the most popular?

I recently organized an online poll to find out which tools for genome, transcriptome, and metagenome assembly are currently the most popular with researchers. After a week or so of collecting results, I ended up with 116 responses that describe over 30 different assembly tools.

Thanks to everyone who took part. I've posted the results to Figshare as a PDF report, and have also embedded this below (I suggest downloading the PDF so that you can use all of the embedded hyperlinks in the report).