Category Archives: Scholarly Collaboration

Global Health Database open to all — to assist H1N1 effort

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From a May 1, 2009 news release from the United States Agricultural Information Network:
 
CABI today has announced free access to its specialist Global Health database – the definitive database for public health information – www.cabdirect.org/globalhealth
 
{ Princeton does have a subscription which is listed under our "Articles & Databases" groupings.}

Simultaneously CABI has developed a Swine flu ‘dashboard’ that brings together up-to-the-minute information on the virus (http://www.netvibes.com/cabialerts).The ‘dashboard’ includes resources from CABI and critical advice from key health organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Influenza researchers urgently need to be able to refer back to previous scientific work in this area to understand the behaviour of previous strains of the virus and to research effective mechanisms for handling earlier outbreaks.
 
In a fast changing sequence of events that has led to the rapid escalation of concern from WHO, and the reaction of national governments in considering their response to a possible influenza pandemic, release of the database is designed to give urgently needed support to those who need it most: scientists, medical professionals and health authorities investigating the causes and treatments of the disease and linkages to past outbreaks.

The Global Health database brings together global knowledge on every aspect of influenza since 1910. The knowledge it contains could provide a key weapon in health researchers’ response in understanding and controlling the virus.

Much of the data in Global Health is derived from publications that have long since vanished. They tell us a great deal about past pandemics, from rates and patterns of transmission, duration, timing of epidemiological peaks, geographical distribution of the disease, government preparedness and quarantine provisions through to effects on different age and social groups, severity in developing versus developed countries, symptoms, causes of mortality (secondary problems, especially pneumonia, were devastating in the Spanish flu) and mortality rates.

 By opening the door to a wealth of historical information on past pandemics, the Global Health database has the potential to reveal vital clues in the international fight against swine flu (influenza A – H1N1).
CABI Swine Flu Dashboard – www.cabdirect.org/globalhealth
Global Health database – http://www.netvibes.com/cabialerts
 

 

 

Current Protocols relaunched with Journal of Vizualized Experiments

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US Wiley-Blackwell relaunches Current Protocols.com – 22 Apr 2009

Wiley-Blackwell, the STM and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., US, has announced the relaunch of Current Protocols.com, a website for scientists engaged in experimental research in the life sciences. The site is projected as an essential resource, bringing reliable, peer-reviewed Current Protocols content together with cutting-edge tools and user-generated content.

The new site will offer users the capability to upload personal protocols to share with the research community; access useful scientific tools and calculators; participate in troubleshooting forums; get expert advice on specific scientific questions related to protocols; read and comment on postings on the Editors blog ‘Beyond the Bench’; access peer-reviewed video protocols; and search or browse through all Current Protocol abstracts.

All content on the site is open access with full text articles remaining on Wiley-Blackwell’s online publishing platform Wiley InterScience (http://interscience.wiley.com).

Click here

Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter 4/22/09

Princeton has a subscription to Current Protocols in Molecular Biology — and JoVE (coming)

Open-source, collaborative drug development!?

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Biochemist calls for ‘open-source’ R&D revolution

 Source: Today’s FierceBioResearcher newsletter

University of Toronto biochemist Aled Edwards has been one of the leading champions of the open-source research movement in drug development. And he has some interesting numbers to back up his calls for a revolution in research.

There are, he says, 600,000 scientists around the world who are engaged in developing new drugs. And they spawn about 20 new therapies each year. That means that it now takes 30,000 lab-years to produce a single new drug at a cost of billions of dollars. The entire process is marked by secrecy and it is increasingly inefficient and wasteful.

To read more go to FierceBioResearcher, the science of drug discovery

FierceBioResearcher 
Click here to get the FierceBioResearcher email newsletter for FREE!

Science & technology online collaboration opportunities

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Here is a summary of some of the latest opportunities for scientists to share work online:

Source: Tenopir, Carol, et al., "Information with a Twist: Vendors keep the party going with Web 2.0",  Library Journal, May 15, 2008.
 
Elsevier:
1.  2collab — ” to support scientific collaboration and information filtering”
2. “Scirus Topic Pages — ” to facilitate scholarly discussion on specialized topics”
 
American Chemical Society:
1. “ACS Nanotation” is an online space in the new ACS journal Nano
2. Offers alerting services via Email or RSS feeds.
 
“Taylor & Francis added “NanoScienceWorks.org,” a free community portal for nanoscience researchers that enhances the NANOnetBASE database.”
Thomson Scientific:
1. “Journal Citation Forum” is an online discussion place for citation research methods.
2. Thomson Scientific will use the “Knowledge Dashboard” from Collexis to build a data mining  tool for Web of Knowledge.
 
IEEE is providing free access to high energy physics articles…otherwise they are keeping the same subscription model.
 
“JSTOR added links to cited references for those journals that are in the JSTOR collection and is adding links to references cited in journals that are outside the JSTOR collection.”