The new NIH Public Access policy started this past Monday. Fellow Nature Networker Graham Steel has summarized this week's reaction of the blogosphere. I would like to highlight some of the discussions we had here on Nature Network. Bob O'Hara wonders about the cost of publishing in Open Access: Show us the Money!. He argues that shifting the costs from reader to author can create problems.

I did a little experiment to figure out whether the full-text versions of my last 15 papers (published between 1997-2008) are available online. The result: * 3 papers available for everybody * 10 papers only available from within my institution (Journal subscription required) * 2 papers only available for purchase Interestingly, the papers in the two journals with the highest impact factor are both available as full-text.

Starting this week, papers submitted from NIH-funded research have to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after publication. But what is the current situation in Germany, especially mandatory Open Access?

Around Christmas, mandatory open access for NIH-funded research was signed into law: The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official

Erythropoietin is an effective drug to increase your number of red blood cells. It is primarily used in anemic patients with cancer and on dialysis, but it is also popular with athletes that want to (illegally) increase their endurance performance, most notably cyclists and cross country skiers.

Anna's recent post about her struggles with Pubmed searches reminded me that there is still a lot that could and should be done to improve the paper (or thesis) writing process. This is my personal list of major annoyances: * Pubmed. This topic has been extensively covered in Anna's post. * Bibliographies.

Participation in a social network can have it's perks. Thanks to the O'Reilly Group on Facebook (that other social network), I received a review copy of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. But why would a scientist want to know how to write and edit articles on Wikipedia? Wikipedia has become a respectable source of information that rivals the more traditional encylopedias such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

A March 13 Nature News article (Six degrees of messaging) talks about a study on Microsoft Messenger chat users. Any random two Microsoft Messenger users (out of about 240 million) could be connected two each other via an average of 6 users that have chatted with each other. This study is just another confirmation of the six degrees of separation concept.

David Crotty, the Executive Editor from CSH Protocols, last month wrote a provocative blog post called Why Web 2.0 is failing in Biology. He did an informal poll among scientists and found that none of them read science blogs or use social networking sites for scientists. His arguments why that is so? * Time. Scientists have little time, and rather spend this time in the laboratory or reading papers * Trust.

Nature News this week reports that This extremely embarrassing story is fortunately no longer possible. The German Kultusministerkonferenz decided on March 6 (text in German) to allow U.S. PhDs to call themselves Dr. in Germany. Until this story evolved, I didn't even know that this is an issue.

To celebrate the annual Pi Day, and in the good tradition of geeky music by scientists, I would like to draw your attention to the American Pi Song (lyrics are found here), best listened to at 1:59 PM today.