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.