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.

Last month (shortly after ScienceOnline2010) David Crotty wrote in a blog post Science and Web 2.0: Talking About Science vs. Doing Science: Nearly all of the more visible attempts (of science and Web 2.0) so far have focused on talking about science, rather than tools for actually doing science.

Last Monday I was listening to a very interesting presentation by Ian Rowlands, reader in scholarly communication in the Department of Information Studies at University College London.

Last Tuesday the German Research Foundation (DFG) announced changes to the grant application process, going in effect in July. Researchers are no longer allowed to list all their publications in their grant proposals. The number of publications is limited to five per researcher and to two per year of planned funding (e.g. 6 papers for a 3-year grant). Publications submitted but not yet accepted for publication will no longer be allowed.

Last week Lambert Heller and myself did a two-day workshop Reference Management in Times of Web 2.0 for a group of German librarians. We introduced and tested the following five programs:RefWorksZoteroCiteULikeMendeleyEndnote The goal of the workshop was to introduce the participants to the Web 2.0 aspects of these reference managers.

Microblogging is blogging of short text messages, photos or other media and is best exemplified by Twitter . Twitter use has grown tremendously in 2009, and this also includes many scientists. ¹ FriendFeed is a another microblogging tool that not only allows sending of short text messages, but connects them together in groups and discussions threads similar to what you can do in online forums.

Nature Network turns 3 years old today, and it has been a very interesting ride. I wasn't around when Nature Network started, but posted by first Gobbledygook blog post (the blog had a different name back then) in August 2007. We passed the 50.000 comments milestone just a few weeks ago. And we were told that big changes to the blogging platform underneath are imminent. I have had many, many positive experiences in these 2 1/2 years.

Just four weeks ago I wrote a blog post titled How do you read papers? 2010 will be different. Not only have we since seen the announcement of the Apple iPad, but last Monday the free Nature.com iPhone app was launched.