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.

Last Tuesday the Archives of Internal Medicine released a study that analyzed the news reporting about cancer in 8 large-readership newspapers and 5 national magazines in the United States. The authors identified 2228 cancer-focused articles published between 2005-2007 and did a more detailed analysis on a random sample of 436 (20%) articles.

Last month (shortly after ScienceOnline2010) David Crotty wrote in a blog post Science and Web 2.0: Talking About Science vs. Doing Science: The blog post is required reading for everybody interested in science and Web 2.0 and has attracted a lot of thoughtful comments (on the blog and on FriendFeed). In another discussion Thomas S ö derquist from the Medical Museion in Copenhagen reminded me that there

Last Monday I was listening to a very interesting presentation by Ian Rowlands, reader in scholarly communication in the Department of Information Studies at University College London.

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.

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.

Sustainability in science is nothing new. The term sustainability science was probably first used in 2001 (see Wikipedia entry), and the title of this blog post was already used by a 2002 editorial in Science . There are both journals (Sustainability: Science, Practice & Policy, Sustainability Science) and conferences (e.g. here and here) about this topic and you can get a degree in sustainability science.

Two papers (this and this) and an editorial in the latest issue of Archives of Internal Medicine examine the cancer risks associated with the use of computed tomography (CT) examinations. ¹ Ionizing radiation increases the risk for developing cancer. There is direct evidence from atomic bomb survivors in Japan in 1945 and from nuclear accidents such as the one in Chernobyl in 1986.