The end of the year is always a time to think about the past and the future. Even more so if you also have your birthday (FemaleScienceProfessor calls it Christmas Time Birthdays). Below are some of my plans for the next year. The general theme: more overlap of science blogging with my daytime job as physician treating cancer patients and doing cancer research.Meet fellow science bloggers I'm looking forward to ScienceOnline'09 in January.

With the December 18 issue Nature started to support XMP markup in article PDFs (reported last week on the Nascent blog by Tony Hammond)1. XMP stands for Extensible Metadata Platform and is a technology to embed metadata in files, including PDFs2. XMP was created by Adobe (with XMP support in PDF files since 2001), but is an open standard with backing by others, including Creative Commons3.

Direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) – advertising for prescription drugs – is only allowed in the United States (since 1997, when restrictions were loosened) and New Zealand. Drug companies pay for direct to consumer advertising (more than $4 billion in 2005 (Donohue 2007)) because they believe that it increases prescription rates.

What started out as a few questions to science bloggers in the Nature Network Bloggers Forum , has turned into a collection of more than 30 blog posts not limited to Nature Network (big thanks to Bora and others for spreading the word). The following science bloggers answered a set of 10 questions about their blogging (roughly in chronological order):Henry GeeEva AmsenSteffi SuhrStephen CurryMaxine ClarkeMartin

Results of clinical trials can sometimes not only change our understanding of the condition studied, but may also affect the way we practice medicine. The Justification for the Use of Statins in Primary Prevention: an Intervention Trial Evaluating Rosuvastatin ( JUPITER ) is such a study.

Henry was the first Nature Network blogger to answer a few questions about science blogging that we discussed in the Nature Network Bloggers forum. Some more posts can be found here and here.1. What is your blog about? I am interested in how the internet is changing the way we publish and communicate science. I write from the perspective of someone that consumes and sometimes produces science.

The Article Authoring Tag Set of the National Library of Medicine (NLM DTD for short) creates a standardized format for new journal articles that can be used by authors to submit publications to journals and to archives such as PubMed Central. [1] The Microsoft Word Article Authoring Add-in that was released earlier this year reads and writes this format.

Working in science is as much about reading papers as it is about writing papers.

Ben Goldacre: Bad Science. Published September 2008 by Fourth Estate Ltd. Paperback, 352 pages, ISBN 0007240198 Ben Goldacre, blogger of the Bad Science [1] column in the Guardian newspaper, in September published a book based on material from his blog. Just like the newspaper column, the book is primarily intended for a general audience rather than the trained scientist or medical doctor.

Today is Open Access Day ¹ , intended to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access.

The 2008 Nobel Prizes will be announced next week, starting with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday. There will be a live webcast on Monday at 9:30 AM GMT for those interested ¹ . As every year just before the announcement, speculation about this year's winners is in full swing. M. William Lensch, here on Nature Network correctly predicted last year's winners ² , and this year he is trying it again ³ .