A few days ago I mentioned bioRxiv to a friend of mine who is a graduate student. She didn’t know of what I spoke, so I enlightened her. Since many of the readers of this weblog don’t have academic access, and pay journals like Nature come after you if you upload PDFs (though the open access via link option is now obviating that), it is often very nice when people originally post preprints on bioRxiv. Sometimes I even link to the bioRxiv version (or the latest) because believe it or not VPN’s can be kind of annoying even if you have access.

On one of the e-lists that I am on there was a conversation about the scientific literature that one reads (see a blog post on the topic). Because the scientific literature in an area like “evolutionary genetics” is an eternal tsunami now you need various filters and aids. PubChase, SciReader and Genomics-Twitter are pretty essential. Recently on bioRxiv I noticed an alerts page. So I am now subscribed to this on my RSS:

http://connect.biorxiv.org/biorxiv_xml.php?subject=genomics+genetics+evolutionary_biology.

Just change the parameters, and you get different subject areas.

Update: Also, I should mention Haldane’s Sieve. I think one major argument for how success that site is is that many people have no idea who is actually running the site, even if they are at the same institution. The message has become bigger than the messengers. And also a mention for Dmitri Petrov, who pushed for the Bay Area Population Genomics meetings, which is another way that scholars push friction costs down and continue the process of disintermediation.