This Sunday I will moderate a session called Providing public health and medical information to all at ScienceOnline09. I didn't pick the title, but it is a topic I care a lot about. Because the session is intended as an open discussion, I thought that a blog post would be good way to organize my thoughts and ideas that I have for this session ¹ . And even though there are only two days left, I might even get some valuable feedback.

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.

The end of the year is always a time to think about the past and the future. Even more so if you also have your birthday (FemaleScienceProfessor calls it Christmas Time Birthdays). Below are some of my plans for the next year. The general theme: more overlap of science blogging with my daytime job as physician treating cancer patients and doing cancer research. Meet fellow science bloggers I'm looking forward to ScienceOnline'09 in January.

With the December 18 issue Nature started to support XMP markup in article PDFs (reported last week on the Nascent blog by Tony Hammond ) ¹ . XMP stands for Extensible Metadata Platform and is a technology to embed metadata in files, including PDFs ² . XMP was created by Adobe (with XMP support in PDF files since 2001), but is an open standard with backing by others, including

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.

What started out as a few questions to science bloggers in the Nature Network Bloggers Forum , has turned into a collection of more than 30 blog posts not limited to Nature Network (big thanks to Bora and others for spreading the word). The following science bloggers answered a set of 10 questions about their blogging (roughly in chronological order): Henry Gee Eva Amsen Steffi Suhr Stephen Curry Maxine Clarke

Results of clinical trials can sometimes not only change our understanding of the condition studied, but may also affect the way we practice medicine. The Justification for the Use of Statins in Primary Prevention: an Intervention Trial Evaluating Rosuvastatin ( JUPITER ) is such a study.

Henry was the first Nature Network blogger to answer a few questions about science blogging that we discussed in the Nature Network Bloggers forum. Some more posts can be found here and here. 1. What is your blog about? I am interested in how the internet is changing the way we publish and communicate science. I write from the perspective of someone that consumes and sometimes produces science.

The Article Authoring Tag Set of the National Library of Medicine (NLM DTD for short) creates a standardized format for new journal articles that can be used by authors to submit publications to journals and to archives such as PubMed Central. [1] The Microsoft Word Article Authoring Add-in that was released earlier this year reads and writes this format.

Working in science is as much about reading papers as it is about writing papers.