Earlier this month I attended RailsConf Europe in Berlin. RailsConf is a conference about Ruby on Rails, a programming framework to produce websites. I'm a part-time Ruby on Rails programmer and had a very interesting conference. Others have already written about RailsConf, so I want to focus on how it was like from a scientist's perspective.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) today announced that it will support Open Access in Springer journals through the Springer Open Choice program.

I recently wrote about the potential of Google Docs and Zoho Writer als online writing tools for scientists. Buzzword is another web-based writing tool and last week was opened for new users. Buzzword is different, because it is based on Adobe Flash, which makes for a much nicer user interface. As expected, Buzzword doesn't handle references as flexible as Microsoft Word.

This Monday Google officially announced Presently, their web-based application for presentations, a.k.a. Microsoft Powerpoint clone. Although it is possible to create presentations from scratch using Presently, most users will probably use it to upload their finished (or almost finished) Microsoft Powerpoint presentations (there is a 10 MB size limit). The presentations can then be shared either globally or to a restricted list of colleagues.

Last week I wrote about web-based writing tools. I believe that these tools are almost there and someone has to put the pieces together to make them work for writing a scientific paper. EJ Press System by EJournal Press, Manuscript Central by ScholarOne and Editiorial Manager by Aries Systems are among the most popular web-based online submission systems.

OncologySTAT is a new (it launched September 7) web portal by Reed Elsevier that offers, among many other things, full access to journal articles in Elsevier oncology journals. Elsevier hopes to generate enough revenue from selling advertising on the web site to compensate for (potentially) lost journal sales.

Google Docs and Zoho Writer are web-based writing tools that have gained many of the features of traditional word processors such as Microsoft Word. Looking at Google Docs as an example (Zoho Writer shares many of the strenghts and weaknesses), I wanted to find out if they are mature enough to write a scientific paper.The Good The major strength is collaboration.

On August 23, the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine or PRISM was announced. PRISM is a lobbying organisation created by the Professional & Scholarly Publishing Division (PSP) of the Association of American Publishers (AAP). The main purpose of PRISM appears to lobby legislators in Washington to not sign legislation that would require public access to all scientific papers within 12 months after publication.

Thompson Scientific today announced the release of Endnote X1 for Macintosh. New features include Applescript support, group references and better support for Endnote Web. Endnote X1 for Windows was released in June. In addition to the features above, it supports Microsoft Word 2007 and Vista. Endnote is an essential bibliographic tool for scientific publishing.

BioMed Central today announced that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute will become a BioMed Central member (read the HHMI announcement here). HHMI will pay all article processing charges for HHMI investigators in BioMed Central journals starting September 1. This announcement comes two months after HHMI started to require that all HHMI-supported research has to become publicly available 6 months after publication and at a time when Yale

The Hirsch number tries to quantify the (scientific) productivity of a scientist. The Hirsch number was first described by the physicist J.E. Hirsch in a 2005 PNAS paper: An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output.