Monthly Archives: August 2011

Distinctive Voices: lectures in Science & Technology at Irvine’s Beckman Center

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“About Dis­tinc­tive Voices  
Dis­tinc­tive Voices high­lights inno­va­tions, dis­cov­er­ies, and emerg­ing issues in an excit­ing and engag­ing pub­lic forum. Do you won­der how things work? What the future holds? If you are curi­ous about the sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy behind today’s hot top­ics, Dis­tinc­tive Voices is for you!
Dis­tinc­tive Voices was cre­ated in 2006 as a pro­gram of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Ini­tia­tive to increase sci­ence lit­er­acy. The live pro­gram­ming hosted at the Beck­man Cen­ter in Irvine, CA received major fund­ing from the Arnold and Mabel Beck­man Fund of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences and National Acad­emy of Engi­neer­ing. Addi­tional sup­port is pro­vided by The Edward Life­sciences Fund and Pacific Life Foun­da­tion. The pro­gram at the Jon­s­son Cen­ter in Woods Hole, MA is sup­ported by the Frank Press Fund of The National Acad­emy of Sci­ences, the Thomas Lin­coln Casey Fund of The National Acad­emy of Sci­ences, the Arthur L. Day Fund of The National Acad­emy of Sci­ences, and the Kel­logg Fund of the Insti­tute of Medicine.”
From their home­page.  Check out the wealth of programs…mainly ~1 hour in duration.

TRY, Initiative on Plant Traits — database

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Wel­come to the TRY Ini­tia­tive on Plant Traits

Quan­ti­fy­ing and scal­ing global plant trait diversity

A net­work of veg­e­ta­tion sci­en­tists jointly headed by
DIVERSITAS, IGBP and the Max Planck Insti­tute for Bio­geo­chem­istry

Main objec­tives:

  • Con­struc­tion of a global data­base of plant func­tional traits
  • Make the data avail­able for the eco­log­i­cal community
  • Sup­port the design of a new gen­er­a­tion of global veg­e­ta­tion models

There is a link to a detailed arti­cle which has just been pub­lished in Global Change Biol­ogy.

AIP releases new app for authors and reviewers — iPeerReview

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“AIP releases new app for authors and review­ers — 04 Aug 2011

AIP Pub­lish­ing, a divi­sion of the Amer­i­can Insti­tute of Physics (AIP), has announced the release of its new app, iPeer­Re­view. The new app allows authors and review­ers to use their iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices to access a broad range of infor­ma­tion on papers sub­mit­ted to any of AIP’s jour­nals in Peer X-Press, AIP’s man­u­script sub­mis­sion and review system.

Once logged in, users can per­form a num­ber of activ­i­ties related to their papers. They can access a list of all active and com­pleted papers, view the sta­tus his­tory of a paper, view and save a paper in PDF for­mat, email a paper, and link to a paper on AIP’s Sci­ta­tion plat­form if it is in pro­duc­tion or to Peer X-Press if it is under review.

When users access iPeer­Re­view, they can either log in or access papers that they have pre­vi­ously saved to their device. The app will deter­mine if they are an author, a reviewer, or both. In the event that they are both an author and a reviewer, iPeer­Re­view will allow them to access both sets of papers under sep­a­rate tabs.”

Source: Knowl­edge­s­peak Newsletter

JISC announces support for govt. recommendations for peer review process changes

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JISC  (Joint Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems Com­mit­tee) in the U.K. is sup­port­ing an open peer review process.  It should be more trans­par­ent and review­ers should be trained.  JISC also rec­om­mends the shar­ing of data in the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity, and there is men­tion in this brief of the Dryad project to facil­i­tate this shar­ing of data in a repos­i­tory.
“The rec­om­men­da­tions came out of a House of Com­mons Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy
Com­mit­tee report that also urged that researchers make their sci­en­tific data
pub­licly avail­able, and that review­ers have for­mal training.”

Source: Knowl­edge­s­peak Newslet­ter, Aug. 2, 2011.

Open Access Coalition

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Today Kansas and 21 other
uni­ver­si­ties and col­leges announced that they’re join­ing forces to form the
Coali­tion of Open Access Pol­icy Insti­tu­tions, or Coapi. The new group will
“col­lab­o­rate and share imple­men­ta­tion strate­gies, and advo­cate on a national
level,” it said in a state­ment. 

 

Read more: http://bit.ly/p8A9eo

Source:  Trevor Dawes, Cir­cu­la­tion Ser­vices Direc­tor, Prince­ton Univ.