Today is Open Access Day ¹ , intended to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access.

The 2008 Nobel Prizes will be announced next week, starting with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday. There will be a live webcast on Monday at 9:30 AM GMT for those interested ¹ . As every year just before the announcement, speculation about this year's winners is in full swing. M. William Lensch, here on Nature Network correctly predicted last year's winners ² , and this year he is trying it again ³ .

This blog entry is primarily intended for science educators that are interested in starting a blog for their teaching activities. Some of them will not be familiar with blogging and other web 2.0 tools. Not the typical audience of this blog, but I would greatly appreciate feedback, as I'm in the process of writing an article about this topic (in German). What is blogging and all this web 2.0 stuff?

Most scientific papers are now published in English, and I believe that this trend is good for international collaboration. Therefore I believe that blogs intended for scientists should also be written in English.

Like many other blogging platforms, Nature Network uses Textile to format blog entries. Textile is a markup language, and Andrew Sun has nicely put together the most important tags in this blog post. Unfortunately, Textile doesn't much help with formatting that is specific to science blogging. Specifically, there is no standard way to link to journal articles.

A year ago today I wrote my first blog post on Nature Network ( Open access may become mandatory for NIH-funded research ). This is blog post #84 one year later and a good time to reflect on the experience. In May of last year I started the science blog in a nutshell , hosted on my own server and written just for fun.

In 2005 registration of clinical trials in publicly available databases before the first patient was entered became mandatory for papers submitted to the most important medical journals. In September of last year, U.S. President Bush signed the Federal Drug Administration Amendment Act (FDAAA) into law.

The British Medical Journal this week published Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial by Phlip Davis et al. There are already several publications that looked at the full paper downloads and citations of open access papers compared to closed access papers.

The German medical journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt did an analysis of the percentage of female first authors over the last 50 years. The number was 0-4% as recently as 25 years ago, but there has been a yearly increase to 18% last year (see this figure), both for submitted and accepted manuscripts. This number corresponds to the percentage of female senior faculty in Germany, but 64% of students starting to study medicine last year were women.

James Evans, a sociologist from the University of Chicago, reports his research on the kind and frequency of citations over the last 60 years in the latest issue of Science . He found a change in citation behavior as more and more journals became electronically available: fewer journals and articles were cited and the cited articles were more recent.