Finishing an exciting research project and writing it up in a paper are the first two steps in getting your work published. The next two steps – submitting your paper to a journal and getting it through the review process – have changed dramatically in the last 10-15 years.

Papers is a great Macintosh program to manage the PDF files of scientific papers on your (Macintosh) computer. I've mentioned several times that I like the program and I interviewed the author Alex Griekspoor back in October.

Almost exactly two years ago, CrossRef invited a number of people to discuss unique identifiers for researchers ( CrossRef Author ID meeting ). One year ago Thomson Reuters launched ResearcherID ( Thomson Scientific launches ResearcherID to uniquely identify authors ). And two months ago Phil Bourne and Lynn Fink wrote about this topic in a PLoS Computational

Mutation and selection are important concepts in cancer biology. One well-known example is hereditary colon cancer. Patients with mutations in the DNA mismatch repair genes MLH1 or MSH2 develop colon cancer because of an increased rate of mutations. And tumors in patients with familial polyposis coli have a growth advantage because of a mutation in the tumor suppressor gene APC.

One interesting session at ScienceOnline09 was Social networking for scientists, moderated by Cameron Neylon and Deepak Singh. We now have so many of these social networking sites, that it becomes difficult to differentiate between them and to see how they can interact with each other. One important category is social bookmarking sites for scientists. I spoke with Kevin Emamy from CiteULike to find out more. Most of the CiteULike team.

The ScienceOnline09 meeting last weekend not only had a number of interesting presentations and discussions, but even more importantly, was a great opportunity to personally interact with a great number of people that share your ideas and interests.

This Sunday I will moderate a session called Providing public health and medical information to all at ScienceOnline09. I didn't pick the title, but it is a topic I care a lot about. Because the session is intended as an open discussion, I thought that a blog post would be good way to organize my thoughts and ideas that I have for this session ¹ . And even though there are only two days left, I might even get some valuable feedback.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the different ways results of a clinical trial can be reported (What are the right numbers for JUPITER). Inspired by blog posts by Eva Amsen (Failure) and Sally Church (Over hyped cancer drugs or sensational journalism?), I thought more about what makes scientific findings worth talking about outside of your immediate research community.

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.