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.

The Science Blogging 2008: London conference will highlight the wide variety of science blogging that has evolved in recent years.

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.

This Sunday morning at the International Congress of Genetics, Tony Griffiths gave an interesting presentation with the above title. He identified 12 possible reasons why students have problems learning genetics. His main argument: students should learn concepts and principles and apply them creatively in novel situations (the research mode ). Instead, too many details are often crammed into seminars and textbooks.

One of the opening lectures this Saturday of the International Congress of Genetics was held by Mario Capecchi. His talked was entitled Modeling human disease in the mouse: from cancer to neuropsychiatric disorders . In the first half he described his mouse model of synovial sarcoma. Synovial sarcoma is an aggressive and often fatal soft tissue tumor.

The 20th International Congress of Genetics started in Berlin yesterday. This is the first time that I attend a meeting as a science blogger. An interesting experience since you look at the talks from a different perspective and you have to try to cover topics that are of general interest but often not really your area of expertise.

Last night we had the first in a series of Nature Network Berlin dinners scheduled around the International Congress of Genetics.

We have been talking a lot about Web 2.0 approaches for scientific papers. Now Elsevier announced an Article 2.0 Contest: Demonstrate your best ideas for how scientific research articles should be presented on the web and compete to win great prizes! The contest runs from September 1st until December 31st.