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.

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.

The best and quickest discussions of a scientific paper now sometimes happen in science blogs rather than in the peer-reviewed literature. Whereas we have a number of scholarly databases that track citations between papers, we don’t have the same tools for science blogs.

The bibliography of a scholarly paper is interesting and important reading material. You can see whether the authors have cited the relevant literature, and you often find references to interesting papers you didn’t know about. Bibliographies are obviously also needed to count citations, and then do all kinds of useful and not so useful things with them. Unfortunately almost all bibliographies are in the wrong format.

Regular readers of this blog know about my current interest in WordPress as a tool to create scholarly content. In the last few weeks I have released several WordPress plugins for reference management and to create ePub files. Obviously I’m not the only person having this idea.

Today I posted the pre-print of a paper titled Author Identifier Overview that I submitted to the journal Libreas. This is the abstract: The paper was of course written with WordPress. I wish you all a Happy New Year.

One of the more complicated aspects of scientific writing is reference management – an important limitation of online collaborative tools such as Google Docs . I have argued before that WordPress has the potential to become a great scientific writing tool. Wordpress can’t do reference management out of the box, and the available plugins are somewhat limited.

Citations are a fundamental concept of scholarly works. Unfortunately they are also difficult to do. Traditional writing tools such as Microsoft Word can’t really handle them in a way that is appropriate for a scientific manuscript, and that is why we have reference managers such as Endnote, Zotero or Mendeley.

In early December Knowledge Exchange, a partnership of JISC (United Kingdom), SURF (Netherlands), DEFF (Denmark), and DFG (Germany) released a report on submission fees that they had commissioned to Mark Ware Consulting. The report was also discussed by Robert Kiley on the UK PubMed Central blog and by Phil Davis on the Scholarly Kitchen blog. Submission fees are more common than I thought, particularly in economics and the life sciences.

On Monday I was finally able to start the clinical trial Everolimus for patients with relapsed/refractory germ cell cancer (RADIT), and I’m now looking forward to recruit the first patient. We aim to treat 25 patients with cancer of the testis with the mTOR inhibitor everolimus in this phase II trial, and eight German hospitals are participating.