Last week I attended the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Chicago. For my work it is the most important scientific meeting of the year, and it is also by far the biggest with more than 30.000 participants. Blogging is a great way to report from conferences, and for me FriendFeed is the best microblogging tool to do that.

Social media and privacy have a complicated relationship, as using social media implies giving up at least some privacy. And the value of a social networking site is directly related not only to the number of users, but also the extend of personal data that the site has collected.

Next month I will participate in the Innovations in Reference Management event organized by Owen Stevens from the Open University.

Last weekend was BibCamp Hannover, a “BarCamp for librarians and other hackers”. If you understand German, you can read about the sessions, discussions and people in the Blog, Wiki, and FriendFeed Room. And Steffi Suhr wrote a nice post about The most beautiful library in the world in her Nature Network blog.

Friday afternoon discussions can be dangerous.

Open Researcher and Contributor ID or ORCID is a community effort to standardize researcher identification. The initiative was first announced last December, and is supported by a growing number of publishers, scholarly societies and academic institutions.

Assuming our airports are again open next weekend, I will be attending a meeting organized by the NSF (National Science Foundation) and EuroHORCS (European Heads of Research Councils) on Changing the Conduct of Science in the Information Age in Washington on April 26. We have been asked to submit a one page white paper in advance of the meeting. ¹ I decided to focus on the importance of standards, obviously leaving

Peer review is central to how we evaluate science and therefore how journal papers, grants, and jobs are awarded. Peer review is done in many different ways, and has dramatically changed in the last 25 years. But the purpose of peer review is still to improve the quality of research by providing feedback and to evaluate the quality of research. The evaluation serves as a filter both for limited resources (e.g. grants or jobs;

Last Wednesday I attended the Health Care Social Media Camp in Berlin. Healthcare Social Media in Europe – #hcsmeu for short – is a community of healthcare twitterers and social media users from Europe, started in August 2009 by Silja Chouquet and Andrew Spong.

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.