STITCH and STRING blog

As an outlet for additional information about various things going on with STRING and STITCH I've created a blog. In particular, I spent the last week in Japan at the BioHackathon 2008 in Tokyo. Besides enjoying the different culture, I got to work on an API for the servers. I guess we'll see if it actually gets used (one of the first uses could be in the Reflect text-mining / highlighting tool, which already uses STITCH to get the pop-ups).

Max Planck Society signs agreement with Springer

In October, I reported that the German Max Planck Society failed to reach a new license agreement with Springer. Now, via heise.de, I learn that they have signed an agreement on January 29, 2008. Here's the press release (there's also a German version).

They details are very sparse, presumably Springer had to come down with the price but they won't state that. However, the press release devotes a lot of space to Open Access, saying that the license agreement "also includes Open Choice™". Open Choice is Springer's author-pays-for-OA program. Now, what does this mean? It doesn't make sense to assume that the agreement talks about access to Open Choice articles, so I guess it must mean that all MPG articles are now going to be published under the Open Choice model. Querying PubMed a bit, I find that the MPG accounted for 6% of the total German research output, so this is certainly an interesting development.