Three leading funding organizations today made this important announcement: The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust announced today that they are to support a new, top-tier, open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research.

At the beginning of the month Google, Bing and Yahoo announced schema.org, a new initiative for structured markup on the web. Richard MacManus responded with a critical piece at ReadWriteWeb (Is Schema.org really a Google Land Grab?), mainly criticizing that the initiative didn’t use RDFa and didn’t seem to have consulted with the web standards body W3C.

The Science Online London 2011 Conference takes place September 2-3 at the British Library. I am again one of the organizers (together with Lou Woodley from Nature.com and Kaitlin Thaney from Digital Science), and I’m getting both excited and nervous the closer we get to September. We have recently posted a first draft of the conference program, and you can see that we are trying something new.

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.

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.

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. The tools are grouped based on their most important features into 1. Ranking search results 2.

On Monday I gave a presentation about ORCID, based on the ORCID Principles. The slides are hopefully a good introduction to ORCID and the current status of the initiative. A good in-person update of the ORCID initiative is the next ORCID Participant Meeting that takes place May 18 in Boston. Registration is free and everybody interested in unique identifiers for scholarly authors is invited to attend. More information at the ORCID website.

The recent tragic events in Japan have made it difficult or impossible for many Japanese scientists to continue their work. The newly launched Nippon Science Support Network has therefore established a database of positions and stipends in other countries for Japanese students, research fellows and scientific personnel.

We are all familiar with digital object identifiers (DOIs) provided by CrossRef to identify (and link to) journal articles. Some of us are familiar with the DOIs issued by DataCite to link to datasets. But most of us don’t know that CrossRef is also providing component DOIs that can provide persistent links to a particular table or figure in a paper.

Version 2.1 of the reference manager Zotero was released last Friday. The biggest change for me is the support of Citation Style Language (CSL) 1.0. CSL is an open XML-based standard for citations and bibliographies. Older versions of Zotero used CSL 0.8.1, but the improved CSL 1.0 was released a year ago.

The history of HTML begins 1989 at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva. Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau and colleagues invented HTML (as well as the transport protocol HTTP and the web browser) to facilitate collaboration between CERN physicists. HTML was originally invented for scholarly communication, but of course by the mid-1990s was also used by everybody else.