One reason why scientists don’t comment at journals

This week, Nature announced a new online commenting facility and noted that:

Online discussions about our research papers are likely to be considerably more subdued, according to the experience of other publishers who already allow commenting.

They offer several reasons why this might be the case. Here’s one: it helps if you make it easy.

BioMart (and biomaRt)

I’ve been vaguely aware of BioMart for a few years. Inexplicably, I’ve only recently started to use it. It’s one of the most useful applications I’ve ever used.