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.

On Saturday I went to see the exhibition Evolving English at the British Library in London.

Last Tuesday Nucleic Acids Research published a nice paper describing the UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) database (McEntyre 2010). UKPMC was started in 2007, the enhanced version described in the paper was launched January 2010. In November 2009 I published an interview with Phil Vaughan, the senior author of the paper.

Earlier today I gave a short presentation about the Scientific Attribution Principles I posted here two weeks ago.

Thanks to a lot of hard work both at Nature Network and here at PLoS Blogs, all blog posts and comments from my former blog at Nature Network (August 2007 to August 2010) are now also available here. Special thanks go to Lou Woudley and Brian Mossop who made all this happen. There are of course a few formatting glitches here and there, but I will try to fix them over time.

The Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) initiative is working on a unique researcher identifier for the creation of a clear and unambiguous scholarly record. The initiative is supported by more than 140 universities, research institutes, funding organizations, publishers and other organizations interested in scholarly communication. The ORCID system will become publicly available in the first half of 2011.

On Wednesday the NCBI released an Images database, compiled from full text resources at the NCBI – initially PubMed Central articles. The images can be searched by several parameters, e.g. figure caption or author. Using this database, images are now displayed together with the PubMed abstract for PubMed Central articles. More info about these changes can be found in the NLM Bulletin.

Today I posted a document that should help define a set of principles for scientific attribution. These principles will be presented and discussed at the National Science Foundation workshop Changing the Conduct of Science in the Information Age on November 12. Many people helped me with this document (Cameron Neylon in particular), and I welcome comments and suggestions.

My post last week about citation rates of mandated vs. self-selected Open Accessfulfills resulted in an interesting discussion thanks to some good arguments made by Stevan Harnad. One personal conclusion for me: mandates for self-archiving are not a good idea. I would very much prefer researchers to be highly motivated to self-archive thanks to a repository that both fulfills important functions and is fun to use.

Biologist Gregory Petsko has written a monthly column for the journal Genome Biology since the journal launched in 2000. To mark the 10th anniversary of the column and the journal, Genome Biology created an eBook (iPad/iPhone: free, Kindle: 99 c) containing all columns up to August 2010. I downloaded the iBooks version for iPad/iPhone.

Two weeks ago I gave a presentation at the STM Annual Conference 2010 in Frankfurt (STM is the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers). I told the audience that publishers could do a much better job helping researchers create digital content – both by providing better tools and by reconsidering licenses for content reuse. A video of my presentation is available here.