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NIH’s Public Access Policy is set to become mandatory following President Bush’s approval on Dec 26th 2007. This much-heralded change, once implemented, will require NIH-funded investigators to submit an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central, as soon as they have been accepted for publication. Peter Suber’s January SPARC Open Access Newsletter contains a detailed analysis of what the change means, and identifies some of the key issues that remain to be resolved.

Further, on Jan 1st 2008 the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s open access mandate came into effect. The HHMI policy requires that, for all manuscripts now submitted that have an HHMI scientist as a major author, a copy of the published article should be deposited in PubMed Central.

More information about the NIH’s open access policy and the HHMI policy can also be found at BioMed Central.

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Sermo, the largest online physician community in the US, recently announced a partnership to facilitate the discussion and interpretation of content in leading NPG medical journals by US physicians.

NPG will add “Discuss on Sermo” links to the online versions of articles in 12 of its leading medical journals, including Nature Medicine, and Nature Clinical Practice. These links will allow physicians reading the journals to create or join discussions of the articles in Sermo’s physician-only discussion community. On Sermo, discussions of research articles include both comments and user-generated surveys, intended to reflect individual observations and opinions as well as compiling the collective wisdom of its 50,000 physician members.

To best facilitate information sharing, NPG will make the full text of all articles from a selection of its medical journals freely available to registered users of Sermo, which is itself freely available to all licensed US physicians. In return, Sermo will allow NPG to use the Sermo community to better inform and extend the relevance of its articles. The partnership is Sermo’s first with a commercial publisher.

Recently, the National Academy of Science and the Institute of Medicine co-released the freely downlaodable book “Science, Evolution and Creationism” (SEC). Written by a group of experts assembled by the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, the SEC was intended to explain the fundamental science, to document the evidence in support of biological evolution, and to evaluate the alternative perspectives offered by advocates of various kinds of creationism, including “intelligent design.” The book explores many inquiries being pursued that apply to prevent and treat human disease, develop new agricultural products, and foster industrial innovations. The book also presents the scientific and legal reasons for not teaching creationist ideas in public school science classes. Aware of school board battles and recent court decisions, the SEC argues that science and religion should be viewed as different ways of understanding the world rather than as frameworks that are in conflict with each other and that the evidence for evolution can be fully compatible with religious faith.

Over the past few days, Peter Jordan’s blog on Nature.com has offered a review of the SEC and also has discussed its place in the current and relevant media, including publications such as the New York Times, books by Professor Richard Dawkins, and the theories of celebrated evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Both the SEC and Jordan’s blog offer excellent resources to those individuals interested in the debate surrounding evolutionary biology, from either a scientific or religious perspective.

Sir Paul Nurse, FRS, Nobel laureate in 2001 for medicine and currently the president of the Rockefeller University in New York, will be speaking in Oxford on February 18. This year’s GlaxoSmithKline lecture hosted by Somerville College is entitled, Milton and Darwin–two views of creation. It will be held at 5 pm in the Medical Sciences Teaching Centre Lecture Theatre, with live transmission to Lecture Theatre 2 at the John Radcliffe Hospital.

Sir Paul Nurse is a british biochemist, who studied biology as an undergraduate at the University of Birmingham and studied the process of cell differentiation as a graduate student, at the University of East Anglia. After postdoctoral work at Edinburgh and a laboratory of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Nurse was offered a position as the Chair of Microbiology at the University of Oxford in 1988. He then returned to the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) at Lincoln’s Inn Fields as the scientific director in 1993, and was appointed the Director General of the ICRF in 1996. He was knighted in 1999. In 2002 the ICRF merged with the Cancer Research Campaign and became Cancer Research UK (CRUK). In 2003, Sir Paul became the president of Rockefeller University.

Sir Paul won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2001 with Leland H. Hartwell and R. Timothy Hunt, for their discoveries regarding cell cycle regulation by cyclin and cyclin dependent kinases.