bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Bye bye Nature Network, welcome SciLogs.com
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

The science blogging network Nature Network is moving to a new home. Today SciLogs.com launched as a new home for Nature Network bloggers. I have been blogging at Nature Network for three years, starting with my first blog post (Open access may become mandatory for NIH-funded research) almost exactly 5 years ago to the day. My blog moved to PLOS BLOGS in September 2010 and all my old Nature Network content can be found here at PLOS BLOGS.
Neelie Kroes talks Open Science
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Earlier this week the European Commission announced new measures towards open science. As part of the announcement interviews of three scientists with European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes were posted on YouTube.
Marketing for Scientists
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

The April issue of

Nature Materials

contains three articles that discuss marketing strategies for scientists. The Editorial (“The scientific marketplace”) introduces the topic and explains why scientists should consider marketing their work.
Zotero 3.0 Released
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Zotero 3.0 was officially released today. The big change in version 3.0 of the reference manager is a standalone version that runs outside the Firefox browser. The first beta was released in August 2011.
Say Hello to F1000 Research
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Faculty 1000 today announced F1000 Research, a new fully Open Access publishing program across biology and medicine, that will start publishing later this year. The default open access license is CC-BY, and CC0 for data.
CrowdoMeter goes Mobile
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Two weeks ago Euan Adie from altmetric.com and myself launched the website CrowdoMeter, a crowdsourcing project that tries to classify tweets about scholarly articles using the Citation Typing Ontology (CiTO). Despite the holidays we have gotten off to a good start with currently 597 classifications by 56 different users, already covering 93% of the tweets we wanted to classify.
Thoughts on the PubMed Redesign
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

It was Anna Kushnir who started it all. Frustrated with the limitations of PubMed when finishing her PhD thesis, she wrote a blog post in March 2008 (I Am Not Yelling. Not Out Loud.) about her experience. The blog post created quite a stir in the blogosphere, especially among science librarians.
ORCID or how to build a unique identifier for scientists in 10 easy steps
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID and was announced in early December. This blog post tries to summarize some of the problems that have to be solved to develop a unique identifier for scientists.
Publication bias in clinical trials
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Last week the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published a paper on selective outcome reporting in clinical trials (Vedula et al. 2009). The primary and secondary outcome(s) of a clinical trial could for example be survival in cancer patients or rate of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events in patients taking cholesterol-lowering drugs.
How to close the digital divide among scientists
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

The term digital divide usually describes the troubling gap between those who use computers and the Internet and those who do not (Wikipedia). Many if not most scientists are experienced users of computers and the internet, and use email or public databases such as PubMed on a daily basis.
Why do we go to conferences?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

I just returned from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Orlando, with approximately 30.000 participants one of the largest oncology conferences. Like other conferences of this size, the experience can be overwhelming, but thankfully the organizers are getting better every year in using technology that helps in finding the most interesting sessions.
A few questions about author identifiers: the answers
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

I've recently asked a few questions about author identifiers for scientists. Here are the results (based on 48 responses). The results are also available as .xls file.
Popularity of online reference managers
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Now that we have a number of online reference managers to choose from, I thought it would be interesting to look at their popularity – both in absolute numbers of visitors and the in changes during the last 12 months. Online tools such as Compete allow everybody to do just that, and their basic functions are free to use.
Twitter for Peer Review
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

A recent

Nature News

article by Geoff Brumfiel (Science journalism: Supplanting the old media?) has stirred up many interesting discussions about the relationship of science blogging and traditional science journalism. Good starting places to follow these discussions (and engage in them) are Technorati, Nature.com Blogs and FriendFeed. Science blogging extends, but also threatens traditional science journalism.
Word processor support in citation managers: Is there a better way?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Citations of the relevant literature are an essential feature of scientific papers. Reference Manager software helps adding these citations and creating a bibliography. Are there differences in how reference managers work together with your word processor of choice?Support for your favorite word processor Support for word processors other than Microsoft Word is spotty.
Papers for iPhone released – time for more poetry
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Papers is a great Macintosh program to manage the PDF files of scientific papers on your (Macintosh) computer. I've mentioned several times that I like the program and I interviewed the author Alex Griekspoor back in October.
Mutation, selection and metastasis
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Mutation and selection are important concepts in cancer biology. One well-known example is hereditary colon cancer. Patients with mutations in the DNA mismatch repair genes

MLH1

or

MSH2

develop colon cancer because of an increased rate of mutations. And tumors in patients with familial polyposis coli have a growth advantage because of a mutation in the tumor suppressor gene APC.
What science is worth shouting about?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

A few weeks ago I wrote about the different ways results of a clinical trial can be reported (What are the right numbers for JUPITER). Inspired by blog posts by

Eva Amsen

(Failure) and

Sally Church

(Over hyped cancer drugs or sensational journalism?), I thought more about what makes scientific findings worth talking about outside of your immediate research community.
Open access is not enough – the source is also important
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) – advertising for prescription drugs – is only allowed in the United States (since 1997, when restrictions were loosened) and New Zealand. Drug companies pay for direct to consumer advertising (more than $4 billion in 2005 (Donohue 2007)) because they believe that it increases prescription rates.
How do you read papers? 2010 will be different
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

In November 2008 I wrote a blog post called How do you read papers?
Happy third birthday Nature Network!
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Nature Network turns 3 years old today, and it has been a very interesting ride. I wasn't around when Nature Network started, but posted by first Gobbledygook blog post (the blog had a different name back then) in August 2007. We passed the 50.000 comments milestone just a few weeks ago. And we were told that big changes to the blogging platform underneath are imminent. I have had many, many positive experiences in these 2 1/2 years.
A digital preservation primer for scientists
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

This weeks's blog post is a guest post on the Biomedicine on Display blog – I was kindly invited by Thomas Soderqvist from the Medical Museum of the University of Copenhagen.

As we have moved to digital formats both for primary research data and scientific publications, digital preservation has become critical to secure permanent access to scientific information.
Let’s make science metrics more scientific
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

In the March 25 edition of Nature, Julia Lane, Program Director of the Science of Science and Innovation Policy Program at the National Science Foundation, wrote an interesting opinion piece about the assessment of scientific performance. She argues that the current systems of measurement are inadequate, as they have several inherent problems and do not capture the full spectrum of scientific activities.
Standards for the Conduct of Science in the Information Age
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Assuming our airports are again open next weekend, I will be attending a meeting organized by the NSF (National Science Foundation) and EuroHORCS (European Heads of Research Councils) on

Changing the Conduct of Science in the Information Age

in Washington on April 26. We have been asked to submit a one page white paper in advance of the meeting.

1

I decided to focus on the importance of standards, obviously leaving
Lst wk I had g8t fun @ #hcsmeucamp
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Last Wednesday I attended the Health Care Social Media Camp in Berlin. Healthcare Social Media in Europe –

#hcsmeu

for short – is a community of healthcare twitterers and social media users from Europe, started in August 2009 by Silja Chouquet and Andrew Spong.
Action points
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Last weekend was BibCamp Hannover, a “BarCamp for librarians and other hackers”. If you understand German, you can read about the sessions, discussions and people in the Blog, Wiki, and FriendFeed Room. And Steffi Suhr wrote a nice post about The most beautiful library in the world in her Nature Network blog.
Supplementary Information: should I stay or should I go?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

On August 11, the Journal of Neuroscience published an Announcement Regarding Supplemental Material by Editor-in-Chief John Maunsell. In it John Maunsell announces that the journal in November will stop accepting supplementary material in article submissions. The announcement has lead to an extensive discussion in the science blogosphere with a number of relevant posts listed below[^1]: * Drugmonkey: Yay!
Flipboard changes the way we use Twitter
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Flipboard is a personalized social magazine for the iPad. The free application was released on July 22, and instantly created a lot of buzz. Because of the overwhelming interest, they had to create a waitlist for the personal features and I could only sign up for and start using them a few days ago. Flipboard is a true iPad application, it would not work the same on a laptop computer or mobile phone.
Bye-Bye Nature Network
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

This is my last post for this Nature Network blog. Later today, I will start a new blog somewhere else – also called Gobbledygook and covering the same topics. Writing this blog here on Nature Network since August 2007 has been an incredible experience, something that can't be covered in a single blog post. I simply want to say thank you to all the people I interacted with over the years – both online and in person.
The Great Science Online London Tweetup
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

The 3rd Annual Science Online London Conference took place last Friday and Saturday. For me it was again a fantastic event. Matt Brown is collecting all blog posts, pictures, videos, etc. over at this Nature Network post. As one of the organizers of the conference (mainly helping with the program) I was pretty nervous, and I have to admit that I didn’t sleep well Thursday and Friday. And much better Saturday.
ORCID as unique author identifier: what is it good for and should we worry or be happy?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

This was the title of the session with Geoff Bilder, Gudmundur Thorisson and myself at the Science Online London Conference last Saturday. Geoff first introduced the ORCID initiative, including several  principles. We then talked about two use cases for ORCID.
Lanyrd: a new Twitter mashup for conferences
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Lanyrd is a new social directory for conferences launched just a few days ago. It integrates with Twitter to allow you to list conferences you are organizing, speaking at, attending, or just following. It is a social directory in the sense that everyone can edit this information (I don’t know who started the Science Online London 2010 page), and that you can see the conferences of your Twitter contacts.
Starting a reading list for Gobbledygook
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

All science bloggers do a lot of reading for background information, or write blog posts based on a (newly published) paper, blog post or news item. So I thought that it would be a good idea to collect those references in a single place. Reading lists are perfect for this, and they are easy to create and maintain with web-based reference managers.
Zotero soon is Everywhere
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Whereas most reference managers are either standalone applications and/or web-based, Zotero works as a Firefox plugin. This approach has many advantages, but is not for everybody.
Introducing Annotum to WordPress Bloggers
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Version 1.0 of Annotum, the free WordPress theme for writing scholarly articles, was announced in late November. Back in June I wrote about the first public version of Annotum, but until now using Annotum was experimental. Annotum is available in the WordPress Themes Directory at WordPress.org (and has been downloaded more than 9,000 times in the past three weeks), and is also available for users of WordPress.com.
Serving shortDOIs
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

The shortDOI service was launched by the International DOI Foundation (IDF) in May 2010. The service creates short versions of the often long DOIs, e.g.

10/dvq

instead of

10.1093/hmg/ddp202

– written as URL this would be http://doi.org/dvq instead of http://doi.org/10.1093/hmg/ddp202.
Two reviews of new reference manager ReadCube
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Today, Digital Science announced an investment in startup Labtiva. And Labtiva released a “community preview” of their reference manager ReadCube. The community preview is a free download for Windows and Mac, and this is the summary of my first impressions. You could write two different reviews about ReadCube. The first version would mention the really slick interface, and the fun you have using the program.
Announcing ScienceCard
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Metrics for scholarly works are used for evaluation and discovery. The Journal Impact Factor is widely used, but is not the best tool to look at the metrics of an individual article. In the past few years we finally started to have the technology to do article-level metrics (citations, downloads, etc.) and PLoS has pushed this concept since at least 2009.
Personal names around the world
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Yesterday I discovered (via a tweet by Owen Stephens) a very interesting document Personal names around the world that discusses the following question: The document was written by Richard Ishida, Internationalization Activity Lead at the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). The document was published on July 26, and Richard was seeking comments until August 7 before finalizing the document.
Mendeley 1.0 released Today
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Version 1.0 of the reference manager Mendeley was released today. In good Web 2.0 tradition it took three years from the first Beta release to the first “finished” product. I interviewed co-founder Victor Henning back in September 2008, and both the software and the company have gone a long way since then. Congratulations. Mendeley has changed reference management in many ways.
Google Scholar Citations, Researcher Profiles, and why we need an Open Bibliography
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Last week Google Scholar announced a new feature on the Google Scholar Blog:

Google Scholar Citations

. The stated purpose of this tool is to allow researchers to calculate their citation metrics, e.g. their Hirsch index (H-index). This is an interesting new service, that not only helps with calculating citation metrics, but also shows you who is citing your papers – a great discovery tool.
Annotum: Publishing with WordPress soon coming to a journal near you
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Last week the first Alpha version of Annotum was released. Annotum is “a scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress”. I first learned about Annotum at the Beyond the PDF workshop in January. One of the themes of the workshop was that we need better tools for authoring, reviewing and publishing of scholarly articles.
Three funding organizations will launch new open access journal
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Three leading funding organizations today made this important announcement: Some features of the new journal:open accessname of journal to be decidedaims to attract and define the very best research publicationspapers will be accepted or rejected as rapidly as possiblefirst issue expected for summer of 2012editor-in-chief and editorial team will be active scientistsjournal will enable improved data presentationlong-term business model to be
Schema.org for Scholarly HTML?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Last Thursday the search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo announced schema.org, a new initiative for structured data markup on the web. Websites that use this schema to markup their data (more than 100 data types are supported) will make it easier for the three largest web search engines to find their content. Schema.org uses microdata, not microformats or RDFa, according to the FAQ this was a pragmatic decision.
Web Tools for Searching the Biomedical Literature – part II
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Ten days ago I mentioned a paper by Zhiyong Lu that gives an overview over the available web tools to search the biomedical literature. Most of these tools enhance the PubMed service, and Zhiyong Lu in fact works for the NCBI, the developer of PubMed. In this post I want to take a more detailed look at the available tools. A good starting point is the companion webpage to the paper, listing 28 services.
Web Tools for Searching the Biomedical Literature – part I
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Zhiyong Lu recently published an excellent overview of the web tools that are currently available to search the biomedical literature. The article has also a companion web page that allows user to filter for the features they are interested in, and to report new tools. The author describes 28 tools developed specifically for the biomedical domain.
Discussing WordPress for Scientists
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Regular readers of this blog know about my current interest in WordPress as a tool to create scholarly content. In the last few weeks I have released several WordPress plugins for reference management and to create ePub files. Obviously I’m not the only person having this idea.
Nature.com iPad app released today
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Today nature.com released their iPad reader application. The app gives users access to Nature News and abstracts from Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Physics, Nature Reviews Microbiology, Nature Reviews Genetics and Nature Communications.
Beyond the PDF … is ePub
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Having breakfast at the end of a conference is a good way to recap what was discussed and can help to generate new ideas. Two years ago at ScienceOnline09 a conversation with Cameron Neylon that followed up on the session Reputation, authority and incentives. Or: How to get rid of the Impact Factor (moderated by Björn Brembs and Pete Binfield) was started my interest in unique author identifiers for researchers.
Having fun with citations at ScienceOnline2011
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

ScienceOnline2011, the fifth annual international meeting on Science and the Web, is only two days away. I am very excited for many reasons, most importantly because it gives me the chance to meet many online friends in person – again or for the first time.
Now in your DeepDyve store: Nature papers to rent
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Articles published in Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Medicine or Nature Chemical Biology are now available for renting from DeepDyve. Downloading or printing is not possible, and the $3.99 rental is for 24 hours. Later this month, Nature plans to release the nature.com reader for the iPad. Monthy access to Nature (again read-only) will cost $9.99. For more information see yesterday’s press release.
WordPress for Reference Management
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

One of the more complicated aspects of scientific writing is reference management – an important limitation of online collaborative tools such as

Google Docs

. I have argued before that WordPress has the potential to become a great scientific writing tool. Wordpress can’t do reference management out of the box, and the available plugins are somewhat limited.
Paperpile: an open source reference manager for Mac and Linux
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Last week the first public beta (version 0.5) of Paperpile was released (available for Mac and Linux). Paperpile is a desktop reference manager with typical features: search in PubMed, Google Scholar or ArXiv, import PDF files, support for BibTex and other standard file formates, etc. Paperpile currently doesn’t sync with a web-based version, and Paperpile doesn’t insert citations into manuscripts.
Digital Science launched: closing the gap between science and technology?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Two weeks ago Eva Amsen wrote in a thoughtful blog post: There’s a gap between science and technology, and it’s growing. Eva argues that – contrary to popular belief – there is actually a divide between science and technology. Scientists are on average not really comfortable using technology, and many computing tools aimed for scientists really miss the point of what scientists really care about.
Occam’s Typewriter: please welcome a new science blogging network
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Last Friday the latest science blogging network officially launched: Occam’s Typewriter. The independent blogging network started out with eight bloggers and one guest blog, all of them well characterized by Bob O’Hara. Most of the bloggers have moved their blogs from Nature Network, where I wrote next to them from 2007 until September this year.
Submission Fees for Open Access Journals?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

In early December Knowledge Exchange, a partnership of JISC (United Kingdom), SURF (Netherlands), DEFF (Denmark), and DFG (Germany) released a report on submission fees that they had commissioned to Mark Ware Consulting. The report was also discussed by Robert Kiley on the UK PubMed Central blog and by Phil Davis on the Scholarly Kitchen blog. Submission fees are more common than I thought, particularly in economics and the life sciences.
Medical Information Matters
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

In December I am hosting the blog carnival Medical Information Matters, a blog carnival about –

medical information

. The deadline for submissions is next Tuesday, and I have already received a number of interesting posts.
Scientific Attribution Presentation
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Earlier today I gave a short presentation about the Scientific Attribution Principles I posted here two weeks ago.
Having an impact (factor) and other stories from Gregory Petsko
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Biologist Gregory Petsko has written a monthly column for the journal

Genome Biology

since the journal launched in 2000. To mark the 10th anniversary of the column and the journal,

Genome Biology

created an eBook (iPad/iPhone: free, Kindle: 99 c) containing all columns up to August 2010. I downloaded the iBooks version for iPad/iPhone.
Helping researchers create scholarly content
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Two weeks ago I gave a presentation at the STM Annual Conference 2010 in Frankfurt (STM is the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers). I told the audience that publishers could do a much better job helping researchers create digital content – both by providing better tools and by reconsidering licenses for content reuse. A video of my presentation is available here.
New in PLoS ONE: Citation rates of self-selected vs. mandated Open Access
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

PLoS ONE today published a paper very relevant to Open Access Week (which started today): Gargouri Y, Hajjem C, Larivière V, Gingras Y, Carr L, Brody T, Harnad S. Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLoS ONE. 2010;5(10):e13636+. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013636.
Survey asks for feedback about ORCID unique researcher identifier
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

The ORCID initiative for unique researcher identifiers yesterday started a survey that everybody interested in ORCID should fill out. The survey asks questions about the main services that users expect from ORCID, and how the ORCID service should be paid for (e.g. membership fees or fee-for service). In quick response to the announcement of the survey on Twitter, an interesting discussion started on

FriendFeed

.
New on Arxiv: first report of SOAP open access publishing project
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Practically all papers in high-energy physics (> 90% since the late 1990s) are first published on the ArXiv preprint server. Several related disciplines also have a long ArXiv tradition.
Reference Management with the iPad
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

The iPad was released six months ago, and we already have several reference managers available for the platform. Reading the PDF of a scientific paper on an iPad is a positive experience, and to me very different from reading the PDF on a regular computer.
Endnote X1 for Macintosh released
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Thompson Scientific today announced the release of Endnote X1 for Macintosh. New features include Applescript support, group references and better support for Endnote Web. Endnote X1 for Windows was released in June. In addition to the features above, ...
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) becomes BioMed Central member
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

BioMed Central today announced that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute will become a BioMed Central member (read the HHMI announcement here). HHMI will pay all article processing charges for HHMI investigators in BioMed Central journals starting September 1. This announcement comes two months after HHMI started to require that all HHMI-supported research has to become publicly available 6 months after publication and at a time when Yale
iWork 08 ready for scientists?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Earlier this month, Apple announced the productivity suite iWork 08 for Macintosh users.
Yale University drops Biomed Central membership
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

The Yale University science libraries have decided to cancel their Biomed Central membership. Dramatically increasing page charges are the reason behind this decision. Other former members of Biomed Central include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Brown University, The Jackson Laboratory, the drug company Eli Lilly, University of Oxford, Cancer Research UK, EMBL and DKFZ in Heidelberg, and many others.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute pays for Open Access in Springer journals
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) today announced that it will support Open Access in Springer journals through the Springer Open Choice program.
You can now share Powerpoint presentations online with Google Presently
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

This Monday Google officially announced Presently, their web-based application for presentations, a.k.a. Microsoft Powerpoint clone. Although it is possible to create presentations from scratch using Presently, most users will probably use it to upload their finished (or almost finished) Microsoft Powerpoint presentations (there is a 10 MB size limit). The presentations can then be shared either globally or to a restricted list of colleagues.
OncologySTAT: free access to journal articles from Elsevier oncology journals
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

OncologySTAT is a new (it launched September 7) web portal by Reed Elsevier that offers, among many other things, full access to journal articles in Elsevier oncology journals. Elsevier hopes to generate enough revenue from selling advertising on the web site to compensate for (potentially) lost journal sales.
Do you know the Flesch score of your papers?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

We just had a very interesting discussion in the Ask the Nature Editor Forum about scientific writing. Most people agreed that the quality of the writing in the end doesn't really influence the decision to accept or reject a paper. But good writing, especially in the first paragraph, certainly helps. But what is good scientific writing? Two weeks ago I suggested a few good books on the subject in a blog post.
German Max Planck Society cancels licensing agreement with Springer
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Last week the German Max Planck Society (MPG) cancelled their licensing agreement with Springer. Starting January 1st, MPG scientists no longer have access to the 1200 Springer journals through the

SpringerLink

interface. This is an important announcement, because the MPG is one of the largest research organizations in Germany and Springer the second largest STM (Science, Technology, Medicine) publisher after Elsevier.
Poor media coverage of cancer research: are blogs one answer?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Kathy Redmond wrote an editorial in the November issue of Nature Clinical Practice Oncology about the media coverage of cancer. She argues that this coverage is frequently of poor quality, reinforcing the myth of cancer as an automatic death sentence and the overemphasis on stories about wonder cures.
STIX: Fonts for electronic and print publishing
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

The STIX Project has finally released a first beta version of their fonts. STIX stands for Scientific and Technical Information Exchange and the fonts were designed specifically for publishing scientific or mathematical texts.
New version of Papers software released
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Papers is Macintosh-only software to manage the PDF files of all the scientific papers you stored on your computer. I previously wrote about version 1.0 that appeared earlier this year.The new Version 1.5 is compatible with Leopard, the latest release of the Macintosh operating system. The biggest improvement is support for search engine plugins.
Your next paper could be computer-generated
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Are you tired of writing a paper, based on real experiments? SciGen could come to the rescue, at least if you do computer science research. SciGen is a program that creates random papers, complete with results, discussion, graphs and references. Some of these random papers have been accepted at conferences or even for publication. SciGen is of course a hoax.
How many authors makes a good paper?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

A recent Nature article, repeated in a Nautilus blog post, talks about author accountability. The article suggests that at least one author per collaborative group signs a statement with reference to Nature's publication policies. This policy would certainly help avoid

honorary authorship

, but it can be difficult to enforce in large research projects. I would like to make another suggestion.
Can a workshop improve your scientific writing?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

How could you improve your scientific writing skills? Two months ago I talked about books. Another idea would be a scientific writing workshop. This weekend I attended such a workshop, organized by Julia Klapproth and Barry Drees from Trilogy Writing & Consulting. The workshop was organized as a 1½ day course with many group exercises.
Is Google Scholar use declining?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

I'm a regular reader of TechCrunch, a popular blog about internet products and companies. But somehow I missed the article just before christmas that talks about the popularity of different Google products. In this analysis, traffic for Google Scholar was down 32% compared to 2006. I haven't seen this information reproduced somewhere else, but the number for most of the other Google products were higher than 2006, as expected.
Should all papers be published in English?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

The Deutsche Ärzteblatt is the official journal of the German Medical Association, just as the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Starting January 21, an English language version of the journal will be available. The publisher and editors of the journal decided to make this step to have the journal articles better indexed in databases such as PubMed and available to more readers.
Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac released
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

January is an important month for Macintosh users. MacWorld Expo takes place every year in San Francisco and we usually see a lot of new software and hardware. The MacBook Air is a wonderful new subnotebook perfect for successful scientists with many talks to give and enough money to spend. But Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is probably the most important new product from a scientists perspective.
Using RNA interference to identify genes that protect from cancer
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Cancer is caused by genetic changes

1

. Oncogenes harbor activating mutations that cause or promote cancer, whereas tumor suppressor genes

2

protect from cancer. In this model, genetic changes in one copy of an oncogene, but both copies of a tumor suppressor gene are required to initiate cancer.
How Nature Network changed my life
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Nature Network turns one year old today and it's time to celebrate. We already have a number of interesting – and entertaining – birthday celebrations. I want to contribute with my personal experience at Nature Network. During the day I treat cancer patients and do cancer research at a German University hospital.
How to COPE with uniform requirements
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

You have finished all the experiments and are in the middle of writing that wonderful manuscript that will change not only the field you are working in but also your personal career. But then you encounter all these complicated issues related to paper writing, including duplicate publications, joint first authors, multi-authored papers and paper rejections.
Six degrees of separation on Nature Network
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

A March 13 Nature News article (Six degrees of messaging) talks about a study on Microsoft Messenger chat users. Any random two Microsoft Messenger users (out of about 240 million) could be connected two each other via an average of 6 users that have chatted with each other. This study is just another confirmation of the six degrees of separation concept.
Is Wikipedia for Scientists?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Participation in a social network can have it's perks. Thanks to the O'Reilly Group on Facebook (that other social network), I received a review copy of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. But why would a scientist want to know how to write and edit articles on Wikipedia? Wikipedia has become a respectable source of information that rivals the more traditional encylopedias such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Public Access Week: New NIH Public Access Policy starts Today
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Around Christmas, mandatory open access for NIH-funded research was signed into law: Starting April 7, the new NIH Public Access Policy implementing this law will take effect for most NIH grantees. The NIH is soliciting comments until May 1st for this new policy. Open Access and this new policy are complicated topics that simply can't be covered in a single blog post.
Public Access Week: How do we do it in Germany?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Starting this week, papers submitted from NIH-funded research have to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after publication. But what is the current situation in Germany, especially mandatory Open Access?
ResearcherID now with Mashups
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

A real Web 2.0 application needs a serious mashup (web_application_hybrid). At least the folks at ResearcherID thought so. You might remember that ResearcherID creates a unique author ID for each interested scientist and was launched by Thomson Scientific (recently renamed Thomson Reuters) earlier this year. The new ResearcherID features include a mashup with Yahoo Maps that shows the location of your collaborators.
Designer debacles and other misdemeanors
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

In the last issue of Nature, a news feature and research highlight look at two recent high-profile paper retractions. The two papers by biochemist Homme Hellinga delt with rational enzyme design. A second group couldn't reproduce the results, ultimately leading to the paper retractions. Then a third group was able to demonstrate that rational enzyme design is indeed possible.
Scientific meetings need more bloggers
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

In one of my first blog posts (before I joined Nature Network) about a year ago I wrote about the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 2007 Meeting. I was surprised that only a handful of blogs reported about the event, one of the largest and most important meetings for clinical cancer research. One would think that blogging and scientific meetings would be a natural combination.
How technology can help you to survive a meeting
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

I'm currently in Chicago at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). This is a large meeting on clinical cancer research with about 30.000 people attending. Rather than writing about the specific research presented and discussed at the meeting, I would like to talk about how (web) technology can help in having a better conference.
Nobel blogging?
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Last night we had the first in a series of Nature Network Berlin dinners scheduled around the International Congress of Genetics.
Mouse models of human cancer and the need for more translational research
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

One of the opening lectures this Saturday of the International Congress of Genetics was held by Mario Capecchi. His talked was entitled

Modeling human disease in the mouse: from cancer to neuropsychiatric disorders

. In the first half he described his mouse model of synovial sarcoma. Synovial sarcoma is an aggressive and often fatal soft tissue tumor.
Article downloads and citations of open access papers
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

The British Medical Journal this week published Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial by Phlip Davis et al. There are already several publications that looked at the full paper downloads and citations of open access papers compared to closed access papers.
FDAAA: Push to open data in clinical medicine
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

In 2005 registration of clinical trials in publicly available databases before the first patient was entered became mandatory for papers submitted to the most important medical journals. In September of last year, U.S. President Bush signed the Federal Drug Administration Amendment Act (FDAAA) into law.
London Science Tour in Pictures
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Pictures missing
Science blogging is the new email
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

The just finished conference Science Blogging 2008: London was a wonderful chance for real-life socialising networking. I started to upload some fotos to Flickr (e.g. Scott Keir explaining sign language, see all fotos tagged

sciblog

here), some of them are too embarrassing and I will keep them for bribes reference later on. The meeting was also a great opportunity to think about where we are today with scienceblogging.
Google Wave – don’t forget the scientists
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Google Wave is a new tool to communicate online and collaborate and was announced today at the Google I/O conference. Google Wave is not only a product, but also an open protocol that anyone can use to build his own wave server.
German Genetics Society Meeting 2009: Introduction
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

This is the first of several posts by guest science blogger Alexander Knoll, who will report from the Annual Meeting of the German Genetics Society. I will be back from my summer vacation on Sunday.

Away from my usually blogging grounds at Alles was lebt at the German Scienceblogs, I want to bring you impressions from the Annual Meeting of the German Genetics Society in Cologne.
German Genetics Society Meeting 2009: Evolution Session
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Another guest post by Alex Knoll reporting from the German Genetics Society Meeting in Cologne.

Just after lunch the next decision: Neurogenetics or Evolution? Here I went with the topic that is less far from my field, and attended the evolution session.
German Genetics Society Meeting 2009: Session IV
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Another guest post by Alex Knoll reporting from the German Genetics Society Meeting in Cologne.

The first session on Friday started with a talk by Frauke Melchior from the ZMBP in Heidelberg on SUMO. Apart from being interesting to work with, it also is good for some rather funny paper titles At the start, she gave a short introduction on the proterties of SUMO.
German Genetics Society Meeting 2009: Session Cellular Genetic Mechanisms
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Another guest post by Alex Knoll reporting from the German Genetics Society Meeting in Cologne.

Both sessions had some interesting talks, so it was really hard to decide between attending Cellular Genetic Mechanisms or Human Genetics, but in the end I went to the former. The first talk by Marina Rodnina from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry is not easy to put into words.
German Genetics Society Meeting 2009: Session Plant Genetics II
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Another guest post by Alex Knoll reporting from the German Genetics Society Meeting in Cologne.

As promised, I attended the second Plant Genetics session of the meeting, thus missing the Epigenetics session. I learned an important lesson at the first talk by Juliette de Meaux from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research: Bring sweets for the audience, and you have everyone on your side!
German Genetics Society Meeting 2009: Session V and VII
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

The final guest post by Alex Knoll reporting from the German Genetics Society Meeting in Cologne.

Session V Friday ended with two talks in session V, the first by Tony Hyman from the Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden. He looked at the ways that cells structure and organize their cytoplasm by comparison with non-biological systems.
From Pilot to Service
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Today I am pleased to announce the launch of a new service, DataCite Labs Search – the service is available immediately at https://search.datacite.org/. This is one of THOR’s first services and is based on work in the earlier EC-funded ODIN Project. The ODIN project launched the DataCite/ORCID claiming tool in June 2013. The DataCite/ORCID claiming tool allows users to add works from the DataCite Metadata Store (MDS) to their ORCID profile.
Reference Lists and Tables of Content
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Geoff Bilder from CrossRef likes to show the following slide at scholarly conferences, and then asks the audience what they see: Most of us probably immediately recognize this document as a scholarly article.
Adding References to the DataCite Blog
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

We launched this blog six weeks ago on a hosted version of Ghost, the open source blogging platform. Ghost doesn't have all the features of Wordpress or other more mature blogging platforms, but it is a pleasure to use. The other alternative would have been to put the blog up on the Drupal-based main DataCite website, but Drupal is really a content-management system and usually not the best choice for a serious blog.
Infrastructure Tips for the Non-Profit Startup
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

When I started as DataCite Technical Director four months ago, my first post (Fenner, 2015) on this blog was about what I called

Data-Driven Development

. The post included a lot of ideas on how to approach development and technical infrastructure. In this post I want to take a second look.
The DataCite Technology Stack
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

DataCite is a DOI registration agency that enables the registration of scholarly content with a persistent identifier (DOI) and metadata. This content can then be searched for, reused, and connected to other scholarly resources. But how does the underlying infrastructure enable this? In this blog post, we will describe what we have built to make this work. This is a fairly technical post, as I tried to go a little deeper into the details.
DataCite switches to Globus for Authentication
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Access to some DataCite resources and services requires authentication so that DataCite knows who is making a request. This includes Fabrica, our DOI registration service that requires a member account, but also our integration with ORCID in the Profiles service, where researchers authenticate with us to allow us to send information about content with DataCite DOIs authored by them to their ORCID record.
Announcing the new Member API
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

When we launched the new version of the OAI-PMH service in November (Hallett (2019)), and retired Solr (used by the old OAI-PMH service) in December, we completed the transition to Elasticsearch as our search index, and the REST API as our main API.
DataCite switches to Globus for Authentication
Authors: Fenner Martin
Published: October 2021

Access to some DataCite resources and services requires authentication so that DataCite knows who is making a request. This includes Fabrica, our DOI registration service that requires a member account, but also our integration with ORCID in the Profiles service, ...