A recent Nature article, repeated in a Nautilus blog post, talks about author accountability. The article suggests that at least one author per collaborative group signs a statement with reference to Nature's publication policies. This policy would certainly help avoid honorary authorship , but it can be difficult to enforce in large research projects. I would like to make another suggestion.

How could you improve your scientific writing skills? Two months ago I talked about books. Another idea would be a scientific writing workshop. This weekend I attended such a workshop, organized by Julia Klapproth and Barry Drees from Trilogy Writing & Consulting. The workshop was organized as a 1½ day course with many group exercises.

Are you tired of writing a paper, based on real experiments? SciGen could come to the rescue, at least if you do computer science research. SciGen is a program that creates random papers, complete with results, discussion, graphs and references. Some of these random papers have been accepted at conferences or even for publication. SciGen is of course a hoax.

Today I decided to rename my blog from Publish or Perish 2.0 to Goobledygook. The old name explained the topics of this blog pretty well, so why the change after only 4 months of blogging on Nature Network? And there are already many blogs with the same name. I simply like the new name. The word Goobledygook was invented by the U.S. congressman Maury Maverick and used in a New York Times article published May 21, 1944.

Papers is Macintosh-only software to manage the PDF files of all the scientific papers you stored on your computer. I previously wrote about version 1.0 that appeared earlier this year.The new Version 1.5 is compatible with Leopard, the latest release of the Macintosh operating system. The biggest improvement is support for search engine plugins.

The STIX Project has finally released a first beta version of their fonts. STIX stands for Scientific and Technical Information Exchange and the fonts were designed specifically for publishing scientific or mathematical texts.

Kathy Redmond wrote an editorial in the November issue of Nature Clinical Practice Oncology about the media coverage of cancer. She argues that this coverage is frequently of poor quality, reinforcing the myth of cancer as an automatic death sentence and the overemphasis on stories about wonder cures.

The U.S. senate yesterday passed the FY2008 Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Bill. The bill includes provisions that make public access of all papers from NIH-funded research mandatory.

Uwe Hossfeld and Lennart Olsson have just added a story from a dark time in German science to the History of Nature website. This article extends an earlier report from September 2006 that uncovered the story of how Nature was banned in Germany in November 1937. The arguments used by the German science minister Bernhard Rust at the time are not worth repeating – they are ideological rather than scientific arguments.

Last week the German Max Planck Society (MPG) cancelled their licensing agreement with Springer. Starting January 1st, MPG scientists no longer have access to the 1200 Springer journals through the SpringerLink interface. This is an important announcement, because the MPG is one of the largest research organizations in Germany and Springer the second largest STM (Science, Technology, Medicine) publisher after Elsevier.

We just had a very interesting discussion in the Ask the Nature Editor Forum about scientific writing. Most people agreed that the quality of the writing in the end doesn't really influence the decision to accept or reject a paper. But good writing, especially in the first paragraph, certainly helps. But what is good scientific writing? Two weeks ago I suggested a few good books on the subject in a blog post.