The U.S. senate yesterday passed the FY2008 Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Bill. The bill includes provisions that make public access of all papers from NIH-funded research mandatory.

Uwe Hossfeld and Lennart Olsson have just added a story from a dark time in German science to the History of Nature website. This article extends an earlier report from September 2006 that uncovered the story of how Nature was banned in Germany in November 1937. The arguments used by the German science minister Bernhard Rust at the time are not worth repeating – they are ideological rather than scientific arguments.

Last week the German Max Planck Society (MPG) cancelled their licensing agreement with Springer. Starting January 1st, MPG scientists no longer have access to the 1200 Springer journals through the SpringerLink interface. This is an important announcement, because the MPG is one of the largest research organizations in Germany and Springer the second largest STM (Science, Technology, Medicine) publisher after Elsevier.

We just had a very interesting discussion in the Ask the Nature Editor Forum about scientific writing. Most people agreed that the quality of the writing in the end doesn't really influence the decision to accept or reject a paper. But good writing, especially in the first paragraph, certainly helps. But what is good scientific writing? Two weeks ago I suggested a few good books on the subject in a blog post.

Both Adobe and Microsoft today announced free web-based solutions for document sharing. Adobe Share uses the Flash technology to display various document formats. Tim O'Reilly has a nice writeup of the new service. Microsoft Office Live Workspace allows the sharing of Microsoft Office documents. Just as with Adobe Share, and in contrast to Google Docs, you can't directly edit documents online. Why should a scientist care about all this?

Earlier this month I attended RailsConf Europe in Berlin. RailsConf is a conference about Ruby on Rails, a programming framework to produce websites. I'm a part-time Ruby on Rails programmer and had a very interesting conference. Others have already written about RailsConf, so I want to focus on how it was like from a scientist's perspective.

Last weekend I visited my brother-in-law in Cambridge (UK). In the Cambridge University Press bookstore I found the wonderful little book How to Write and Illustrate a Scientific Paper by Björn Gustavii (Cambridge University Press 2003). On less than 150 pages B. Gustavii gives a good summary of the typical problems and their solutions.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) today announced that it will support Open Access in Springer journals through the Springer Open Choice program.

I recently wrote about the potential of Google Docs and Zoho Writer als online writing tools for scientists. Buzzword is another web-based writing tool and last week was opened for new users. Buzzword is different, because it is based on Adobe Flash, which makes for a much nicer user interface. As expected, Buzzword doesn't handle references as flexible as Microsoft Word.

This Monday Google officially announced Presently, their web-based application for presentations, a.k.a. Microsoft Powerpoint clone. Although it is possible to create presentations from scratch using Presently, most users will probably use it to upload their finished (or almost finished) Microsoft Powerpoint presentations (there is a 10 MB size limit). The presentations can then be shared either globally or to a restricted list of colleagues.