Friday, July 24, 2015

OATP primary

OATP primary

Open Technology Week | OpenPlant

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 03:00 AM PDT

Open Technology Week is happening next week, July 25, 2015-July 30, 2015. The week is sponsored by OpenPlant and events will be in Cambridge, UK.

According to the website,  "OpenPlant is a joint initiative between the University of Cambridge, John Innes Centre and The Sainsbury Lab, funded by BBSRC and EPSRC." Goals include "interdisciplinary exchange, Open technologies for innovation, and Responsible innovation for sustainable agriculture and conservation."

Events occuring during the Open Technology Week occur every day. See the website for event details and registrations:

http://openplant.org/event-directory/open-technology-week/

 

Expanding the Classroom with Open Educational Resources

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 02:51 AM PDT

Responding to increased student textbook costs, educators, institutions, and even state legislators are focusing their attention on Open Educational Resources (OER). In addition to saving money for students, OER allow authors and educators to continually adapt their teaching tools, bypass high textbook costs, and create, share, and access global curricular resources. In this webinar, Danielle Maestretti and Michelle Barron-Lutzross of bepress Consulting Services will discuss ways to integrate OER into the institutional repository, a strategy that allows libraries to play a pivotal role in the success of OER on campus. We will parse recent research on OER, describe strategies for faculty awareness and engagement, and share examples from successful OER collections in several IRs.

The need for ‘Diamond Engagement’ around open access to high quality research output | Australian Policy Online

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 02:21 AM PDT

"This paper advocates for a co-ordinated cultural shift in their engagement with access to resources in order to make peer-reviewed articles available to a wider audience. This Paper addresses two audiences: scientists, especially those who have been traditionally more resistant to the OA approach, and policy makers. The Scientific Committee is well aware of the difficulties that some research communities face in engaging with the OA approach and would like to offer a way forward to address the current status quo. Social scientists in particular have been struggling with the discussion on OA, given the length of time that the current quality standards and good practice for publication took to set up. The community of researchers perceives that these standards are now guarded by the peer-reviewed ranked journals which do not offer OA for either articles or books, a situation that is certain to persist for some time.   The other important aspect is that payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) to journals for OA publication is often unaffordable given the limited resources available to the social sciences disciplines. In this context, this paper illustrates how the deposition of articles in public repositories can be beneficial to the research community. At the same time, this Paper encourages policy makers to better invest in the harmonisation of research information metadata standards across Europe using existing public infrastructures, and to ensure good quality of records, interoperability and discoverability. It also links the discussion of OA with an issue that is crucial in both research and policy agendas: demonstration of the impact of publicly-funded research ..."

JASON SIMONS: Open data can create business magic - Business - Wanganui Chronicle News

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 02:16 AM PDT

"PIONEERING entrepreneurial companies are using open data to create innovative products and services that fill gaps in the market and bring wide economic benefits. To the lay person, open data might be one of those topics that make your eyes glaze over, but if you are a business person with limited resources open data should be your new best friend. Open data is information that can be freely used, re-used, and distributed by anyone. It is non-personal data, which does not contain information about specific individuals. Most government data is legally available and therefore can be made open and available for others to use. There are various reasons why open data is important to local and central Government, which often collects the information in the first place, including transparency, accountability and improved efficiency of services ..."

Consent decrees open police data, but for a limited time only - Sunlight Foundation Blog

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 02:15 AM PDT

"Well, since the enactment of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act a portion of that responsibility has gone to the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). When a local or state police department exhibits a pattern of unconstitutional practices or policies, Section 14141 of the 1994 bill gives the DOJ jurisdiction to investigate and litigate that department. These investigations often result in an agreement between the DOJ and the police department called a consent decree (also known as a 'memorandum of agreement' or 'settlement agreement'). This May, Cleveland entered into a consent decree after the DOJ reported "systemic deficiencies and practices" that contributed to unreasonable police use of force throughout the police department. The consent decree outlines requirements that will make policies, procedures, audits and select police data publicly available. Specifically, the agreement encourages transparency for use of force justifications, the establishment of a 13-member citizen advisory committee and revisions to search and seizure policies. In March, the Ferguson Police Department (FPD) received findings from their Section 14141 investigation and is currently negotiating a consent decree with the DOJ; alike to Cleveland, FPD also received recommendations to improve the openness of its data. If FPD does not settle with the DOJ, they could risk dissolution or further litigation. Consent decrees can help achieve greater transparency and accountability in policing because they often require departments to institute new policy, collect new data and report data publicly. New Orleans' 2012 consent decree was particularly expansive, requiring the police department to improve the quality and availability of police data, policies, manuals, reports and audits. The policy changes required by the consent decree opened a multitude of police datasets, making New Orleans a leading city in open data and police accountability. However, consent decrees and their associated federal oversight eventually end ..."

Guidance for the open sharing of epigenome data: an author Q+A - On Biology

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 02:13 AM PDT

"Open sharing of epigenome data is crucial to ensure progression of large-scale data-intensive research. A new Opinion article published recently in Genome Biology aims to make the sharing of such data easier for researchers. Here, first author Stephanie Dyke answers questions about this work ..."

Open source and open data empower modern meteorologists | Opensource.com

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 02:12 AM PDT

"For years, meteorology students learned their craft at the tip of a colored pencil, laboriously contouring observed data by hand. While many forecasters still practice this art, computers have changed operations, research, and education. Open source software and open data are poised to bring more changes to the field. In a sense, openness has always been there. Meteorology has a culture of sharing by its very nature—after all, what good is a forecast if you don't share it? The National Weather Service data is publicly available if you know where to look for it (and what to do with it once you've found it). And while much of the software in use by educational institutions is open source, until recently there was little interoperability. Different visualization suites had their own data formats, so raw data would have to be processed several times. Students and their instructors were effectively limited to whatever options the tools they use provide. But a shift is underway in the community. By using a variety of open source projects, meteorologists can use 'one tool to read the data, then do any calculating they want,' Professor Mike Baldwin explains. Baldwin is an associate professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University. Along with Stephen Harrell of Purdue's Research Computing group, Baldwin is working to give undergraduate meteorology majors more hands-on experience in manipulating weather data. Instead of monolithic and domain-specific tools, students are learning to use and develop software written with broadly-used scientific libraries. Python has become the dominant language, thanks in no small part to libraries like SciPy, NumPy, and matplotlib ..."

Springer content available across ReadCube platform | EurekAlert! Science News

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 02:08 AM PDT

Springer has signed an agreement with the publishing technology company ReadCube to enhance and increase the discoverability of its journal articles, book chapters and conference proceedings via ReadCube's web, desktop and mobile applications. More than eight million scientific documents on SpringerLink have been indexed by ReadCube's Discover service. Designed to make it easier for researchers to find scholarly content, ReadCube Discover puts Springer's content at researchers' fingertips via its enhanced reading environments, as well as providing search engines and personalized recommendation feeds ... All Springer journal articles, book chapters and proceedings viewed within the ReadCube environment now feature enhancements such as hyperlinked inline citations, annotation tools, clickable author names, integrated altmetrics and direct access to supplemental content. To view an example of an interactive article, visit: http://rdcu.be/c0Mt ..."

AllTrials – Pharma company investors call for clinical trials transparency

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 02:06 AM PDT

"Today investors representing more than €3.5 trillion in assets are asking the pharmaceutical companies they invest in to move towards transparency. The groups of 85 pension funds and asset managers support the aims of the AllTrials campaign and want the pharma companies to set out their plans to get clinical trials, past, present and future, registered and results reported  ... BNP Paribas Investment Partners worked with AllTrials to bring together the group which includes RobecoSAM, Aviva Investors, Boston Commons Asset Management, 65 UK local authority pension funds and the investment arm of the Wellcome Trust. We held a series of workshops with investors in Europe and the US over the last 6 months to develop the practical steps they are today writing to companies to ask them to take. These steps include [1] Retrospectively registering past and ongoing clinical trials, and registering all future trials before they begin [2] Publishing the methods and full results of all trials, including information on adverse events [3] Posting an objective summary of results within one year of completion of the trial, following the guidelines on ClinicalTrials.gov [4] Supporting efforts to provide independent researchers access to anonymised individual patient data ..."

Formerly out-of-view Collections will ecome publicly accessible

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 01:56 AM PDT

"With $2.2 million in support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and in partnership with Artstor, the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) is offering 42 liberal arts colleges and universities the opportunity to join its Consortium on Digital Resources for Teaching and Research. The Consortium intends to improve teaching and learning, enhance faculty and student/faculty research, and streamline administrative capabilities through a uniform digital system of cataloging research material collections. The grant will support three years of workshops for librarians and faculty and staff members and will subsidize use of Shared Shelf, Artstor's digital asset management service already used by institutions such as Harvard and Cornell. With this grant, digital documentation of collections held by institutions such as Presbyterian College (SC), Tuskegee University (AL), and University of St. Mary (KS) will now be maintained‎ and made publicly accessible via the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) through Artstor, the nonprofit organization that provides Shared Shelf and serves as one of DPLA's content-providing 'hubs.' The collections include Russian icons from Allegheny College (PA); Civil War history objects from Central Methodist University (MO); oral histories of Erie area refugees from Gannon University (PA); the story of Buddhism in the Catskills from Hartwick College (NY); the record of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's visit to Keuka College (NY); Egyptian Papyri from the Robert C. Horn Collection at Muhlenberg College (PA); and many others ..."

OpenPlant | open technologies for plant synthetic biology

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 01:48 AM PDT

"OpenPlant is a collaborative initiative between the University of Cambridge, the John Innes Centre and The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich. OpenPlant is focused on the development of open technologies for plant synthetic biology and promotes foundational technologies that facilitate exchange and freedom to operate in research environments, as well as the application of technologies for trait engineering ..."

Sanders offers amendment to create compulsory licenses on medical inventions, for veterans | Knowledge Ecology International

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 01:44 AM PDT

"On Wednesday, July 22, 2015, the Senate Veterans Committee held a mark-up to consider several bills. During the mark-up, Senator Sanders offered an amendment, attached below, that would create a compulsory license mechanism in the Department of Veterans Affairs, for patents on medical inventions. (See amendment text below). The motivation for the amendment was a crisis in the VA involving access to drugs for the hepatitis C virus (HCV). The high cost of the new HCV drugs from Gilead and AbbVie combined with the large number of Veterans living with HCV depleted the VA budget for drugs, and blocked enrollment of patients for treatment. The VA then proposed transferring $500 million from the VA Choice Program, which was set up to allow veterans to get health care from non-VA doctors. Since May, Senator Sanders has been pushing to VA to consider breaking the patents on sofosbuvir and other HCV drugs, as an alternative to cutting benefits from another VA program for veterans. On May 12, 2015, Sanders asked the VA to consider using the 'Government use' provisions in the U.S. patent law, to authorize the VA to buy generic versions of the HCV drugs. Sanders referred to 28 USC 1498(a), a section of U.S. law that allows any federal agency to authorize the use of a patent 'by or for the United States without license of the owner.' The statute covers 'a contractor, a subcontractor, or any person, firm, or corporation' taking actions for a government entity. Courts have extended this power even to institutions like the Smithsonian or the Federal Reserve. The VA subsequently rejected Sander's proposal, citing the uncertainty over the compensation required under 28 USC 1498(a). At the July 22, 2015 hearing, Sanders offered an amendment to that would have added language to Title 38 of the U.S. Code, the statutes for Veterans Benefits ..."

US, EU investors ask Big Pharma to release all drug trial results, including failures | Ars Technica UK

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 01:41 AM PDT

"A group of UK and US investors holding more than €3.5 trillion (£2.5 trillion, $3.8 trillion) in assets are asking the pharmaceutical companies they invest in to make all the results of drug trials they conduct public. The AllTrials site reports that 85 pension funds and asset managers support its aims of requiring pharma companies to set out their plans to have past, present, and future clinical trials registered and their results reported. The campaign hopes to compel drug companies to release all their clinical trial results, irrespective of whether they succeeded or not, to allow independent researchers to verify results and fine-tune treatments in order to improve health and lower treatment costs ..."

Open Access, H-Net and Mission-Driven Alliances | HNet-Executive-Council | H-Net

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 01:40 AM PDT

"One of the (many) exciting parts of participating in the H-Commons is to be able to share and re-use scholarly communications across networks and with multiple formats. H-Net, in its new platform, continues to find connections across borders normally assigned to professional organizations eager to stake their claims in contested areas of intellectual inquiry. This effort contributes to a primary goal of all scholarly institutions: to support the creation of new knowledge, distribute it in an intentional and ethical way by which communities near and far may learn how to make the world a better place. Sometimes this means we seek to break down traditional silos between discipline-based cadres and try on new identities, speak a different language, or see from previously unexplored perspectives. In their white paper 'A Scalable and Sustainable Approach to Open Access Publishing and Archiving for Humanities and Social Sciences' (2014), Rebecca Kennison and Lisa Norberg present a model of collaboration that offers libraries, university presses and research institutions a way to publish in the open and sustain those archives for generations to come. These two scholars from Barnard College and Columbia University offer their model in the hope that readers agree with their basic premise about the inherent value for research in the humanities and social sciences ..."

Open Access Pathfinder Case Study - Durham University

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 01:37 AM PDT

Use the link to access the case study.

▶ Interview Mark Bovens about Open Access - Video Dailymotion

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 01:35 AM PDT

Use the link to access the video.

Wellcome Trust Launches Guide for Publishing Open Access Monographs and Book Chapters - OASPA

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 01:32 AM PDT

"Open access for monographs and book chapters is a relatively new area of publishing, and there are many ways of approaching it.   With this in mind, a recent publication from the Wellcome Trust aims to provide some guidance for publishers to consider when developing policies and processes for open access books. The Wellcome Trust recognises that implementation around publishing monographs and book chapters open access is in flux, and invites publishers to email Cecy Marden at c.marden@wellcome.ac.uk with any suggestions for further guidance that would be useful to include in this document. 'Open Access Monographs and Book Chapters: A practical guide for publishers' is available to download as a pdf from the Wellcome Trust website."

PLOS ONE: In an Age of Open Access to Research Policies: Physician and Public Health NGO Staff Research Use and Policy Awareness

Posted: 24 Jul 2015 01:30 AM PDT

[Abstract] Introduction Through funding agency and publisher policies, an increasing proportion of the health sciences literature is being made open access. Such an increase in access raises questions about the awareness and potential utilization of this literature by those working in health fields. Methods A sample of physicians (N=336) and public health non-governmental organization (NGO) staff (N=92) were provided with relatively complete access to the research literature indexed in PubMed, as well as access to the point-of-care service UpToDate, for up to one year, with their usage monitored through the tracking of web-log data. The physicians also participated in a one-month trial of relatively complete or limited access. Results The study found that participants' research interests were not satisfied by article abstracts alone nor, in the case of the physicians, by a clinical summary service such as UpToDate. On average, a third of the physicians viewed research a little more frequently than once a week, while two-thirds of the public health NGO staff viewed more than three articles a week. Those articles were published since the 2008 adoption of the NIH Public Access Policy, as well as prior to 2008 and during the maximum 12-month embargo period. A portion of the articles in each period was already open access, but complete access encouraged a viewing of more research articles. Conclusion Those working in health fields will utilize more research in the course of their work as a result of (a) increasing open access to research, (b) improving awareness of and preparation for this access, and (c) adjusting public and open access policies to maximize the extent of potential access, through reduction in embargo periods and access to pre-policy literature.
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