Nature Communications is a new journal that will launch in Spring 2010. The journal will publish papers in all areas of the physical, chemical and biological sciences and is open for submissions.

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.

In September PLoS started to show usage data (downloads, citations, but also use of social bookmarking services and blog posts) for all their published papers (article-level metrics at PLoS: addition of usage data). PLoS is not the first publisher to do that, but certainly the largest to date.

PubMed Central was launched in February 2000 by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a free digital archive of journal articles. Just as PubMed, PubMed Central covers research in the life sciences, but not other areas of research, e.g. engineering, physical sciences or astronomy.

This week (October 19-23) is Open Access Week – a good opportunity to think and write about this topic. On Monday I wrote in a blog post: In that blog post I then wrote about the role of the researcher as a reader. Now I want to look at the perspective of the researcher as an author.

This week (October 19-23) is Open Access Week: Open Access Week is an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access policies from all types of research funders, within the international higher education community and the general public. The following video from SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing &

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.

Blogging is a great way to report from a scientific conference. This could be done either with regular blog posts written in the evening or after the conference, and/or live-blogging using tools such as Friendfeed or Twitter.

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.

Another guest post by Alex Knoll reporting from the German Genetics Society Meeting in Cologne. Saturday had two more sessions before the end of the meeting. Irina Stancheva from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh started us into the day with a talk on epigenetics in mouse development. One form of epigenetic silencing is methylation of cytosine bases in DNA.