Last Tuesday the German Research Foundation (DFG) announced changes to the grant application process, going in effect in July. Researchers are no longer allowed to list all their publications in their grant proposals. The number of publications is limited to five per researcher and to two per year of planned funding (e.g. 6 papers for a 3-year grant). Publications submitted but not yet accepted for publication will no longer be allowed.

Last week Lambert Heller and myself did a two-day workshop Reference Management in Times of Web 2.0 for a group of German librarians. We introduced and tested the following five programs:RefWorksZoteroCiteULikeMendeleyEndnote The goal of the workshop was to introduce the participants to the Web 2.0 aspects of these reference managers.

Microblogging is blogging of short text messages, photos or other media and is best exemplified by Twitter . Twitter use has grown tremendously in 2009, and this also includes many scientists. ¹ FriendFeed is a another microblogging tool that not only allows sending of short text messages, but connects them together in groups and discussions threads similar to what you can do in online forums.

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.

Just four weeks ago I wrote a blog post titled How do you read papers? 2010 will be different. Not only have we since seen the announcement of the Apple iPad, but last Monday the free Nature.com iPhone app was launched.

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.

Following the ScienceOnline2010 conference, librarian Dorothea Salo wrote on her blog: These are serious questions, and of course I don't have the answers. But I would like to add my thoughts from a researcher perspective. The role of libraries in providing teaching material for students (textbooks, etc.) is another story that I will not touch today.

ScienceOnline2010 just finished a few hours ago, and from what everyone was saying it was yet another wonderful meeting. I attended last year and moderated a session called Providing public health and medical information to all, but unfortunately could not come this year. News about ScienceOnline2010 are all over the place, including from our own Henry Gee.

In November 2008 I wrote a blog post called How do you read papers?

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.