Category Archives: Web resources

Scitable, a free online science library from Nature Publishing Group

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"…explore Nature Education’s Scitable, a free online science library published by editors at Nature Publishing Group.  Scitable is used every day by thousands of faculty, graduate students, researchers, and science writers. Scitable is a scientist-authored, cutting-edge learning resource you can recommend with confidence." 

New additions:

  • Essentials of Genetics, a free course on the basic concepts of genetics, featuring high quality animations, clear explanations, and links to biographies and research papers.
  • 30+ new Readings on important topics in genetics, each written and reviewed by leading researchers and filled with links to research milestones.
  • Scitable Classrooms, a free online research space that teaching faculty can create in less than 5 minutes. Scitable Classrooms include news feeds, reading lists, and threaded discussions.  Watch our “how to” video that shows faculty how to set up a classroom

 From today’s email:  Nature Publishing Group [Nature.Publishing.Group@information.nature.com]

DSpace at Princeton University is open for business!

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DataSpace can now be used to store papers and data.  From the homepage:

"DataSpace is a digital repository meant for both archiving and publicly disseminating digital data which are the result of research, academic, or administrative work performed by members of the Princeton University community. DataSpace will promote awareness of the data and address concerns for ensuring the long-term availability of data in the repository."

There are papers from 2 groups or communities available so far: 

Civil and Environmental Engineering
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs

There is a useful "About" page, and the "Help" page gives you the mechanics of running searches using the Jakarta Lucerne search engine, which bears lots of similarities to Google.

Contact:  Mark Ratliff, Digital Repository Architect, Phone: (609) 258-0228.

BioTorrents — easier, faster exchange of science-related open-access software and datasets

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The goal of BioTorrents is to allow easier and faster exchange of science-related open-access software and datasets.
BioTorrents allows scientists to rapidly share their results, datasets, and software using the popular BitTorrent file sharing technology.   (The BioTorrents website)

From Alain Borel (Bibliotheque Scientifique, Lausanne) on the CHMINF Listserv, 1/18/10,  in response to the introduction of the subject by Egon Willighagen at Uppsala Univ.:

 
"The distributed nature of BitTorrents sounds nice (it doesn’t matter that zillions of users start downloading stuff, since they rapidly all become data sources themselves). However, I wonder how the updates will be treated? OAI-PMH feels like a much better protocol from this point of view. Maybe OAI-PMH could be used as a wrapper for publishing and harvesting BitTorrent seeds (one seed par article)?" (A.B.)
 
From the website:
"The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a low-barrier mechanism for repository interoperability. Data Providers are repositories that expose structured metadata via OAI-PMH. Service Providers then make OAI-PMH service requests to harvest that metadata. OAI-PMH is a set of six verbs or services that are invoked within HTTP."
…offering Interoperability through Metadata Exchange

WorldCat, world’s largest book catalog, now lists JSTOR articles!

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"JSTOR now indexed in WorldCat.org – 18 Jan 2010

Authenticated scholars and researchers with online access to full-text content in JSTOR can now locate and connect to articles through WorldCat.org. JSTOR is a preservation archive and research platform for the academic community.

Over 4.5 million JSTOR article-level records from more than 1,000 journals, selected monographs, and other scholarly content are now indexed in WorldCat.org, the Web destination for discovery of materials in libraries worldwide. JSTOR records are delivered in WorldCat.org search results. Scholars and researchers using WorldCat.org can now identify content in JSTOR and connect to the full-text using the authorisation provided by their library.

WorldCat.org is a Web destination with search and social networking features that allow information seekers to discover, localise, and personalise content from local collections and those of more than 10,000 WorldCat libraries worldwide. WorldCat.org indexing of JSTOR metadata helps researchers easily identify resources in the collection alongside other materials relevant to their work. An authorization is required for access to full-text materials in JSTOR.

WorldCat claims to be the world’s largest database of bibliographic information built continuously by libraries around the world since 1971. Each record in the WorldCat database contains a bibliographic description of a single item or work and a list of institutions that hold the item. The institutions share these records, using them to create local catalogs, arrange interlibrary loans and conduct reference work. There are now more than 165 million records in WorldCat spanning five millennia of recorded knowledge. Like the knowledge it describes, WorldCat grows steadily. Every second, OCLC and its member libraries add seven records to WorldCat."

Source:  Knowledgespeak Newsletter.

Book barcodes can be scanned on iPhone with RedLaser app

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Scan a book barcode with your iPhone, see if we have it

Now thanks to a popular iPhone app called RedLaser, you can scan a book barcode and find our library results through WorldCat.org. The app shows results for our library and libraries nearby, when we have the item. Currently library results for RedLaser are for books only. Watch a 43 second YouTube video to see RedLaser’s library results in action, and then download the $1.99 app through Apple’s iTunes app store.

From today’s OCLC alert: NEW for WorldCat.org

Scientific Research support: funding and collaboration tools

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"The NIH grabbed $10 billion of taxpayers’ funds funneled through the stimulus bill, and NIH chief Francis Collins says the money was used to save or create 50,000 research jobs. In many cases, he adds, the extra funds have kept America’s scientists in American labs." 

– here’s the story from Bloomberg

From FierceBiotech Research [editors@fiercebioresearcher.com]  1/5/10, by John Carroll

_____________________________________________________________

 

"National networking provides opportunities for scientists to collaborate in new, exciting ways to improve abilities to uncover underlying pathways and mechanisms of biology and to develop new diagnostics, treatments and prevention strategies," said NCRR Director Barbara Alving, M.D. "The infrastructure created and implemented through these awards has the potential to greatly facilitate the pace of biomedical research nationwide."

– here’s the NIH release
– check out a list of project partner institutions here   — besides Harvard and U of Florida

Read more: http://www.fiercebiotechresearch.com/story/nih-seeds-scientific-networking-projects-27m/2009-11-02?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal#ixzz0bxKR7UYy
 

Also from FierceBiotech Research [editors@fiercebioresearcher.com] 11/2/09, by John Carroll

Chemistry journals information — CASSI

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"The CAS Source Index (CASSI) search tool is a web-based resource intended to support researchers and librarians who need accurate bibliographic information. This new tool has been created as a free-of-charge resource that will enable researchers to confirm journal titles and journal title abbreviations in an easily accessible electronic format.

 

This free, web-based tool can serve as a companion tool to CASSI on CD customers to provide easy access for basic journal and abbreviation look-ups, while CASSI on CD provides additional functionality and data such as holdings information, DDS availability, certain record details, and archival ability. To start using the new CASSI search tool, visit http://cassi.cas.org."

Posted to CHMINF-L by Peter Carlton at CAS.org 

Complete genomes of 10 individuals to be put on Web

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 From FierceBiotech IT [editors@fiercebiotechit.com]

 

"Tech glitterati strut DNA online

By George Miller Comment | Forward

Ten DNA-sequenced volunteers are posting this most private information online, unprotected. You’ll recognize some of them by reputation, if not their DNA: pioneering technologist Esther Dyson, and high-ranking individuals from the tech/biotech industries and academia.

They are baring all, so to speak, mainly to see what happens. George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, is behind the exposure. He, Dyson and eight others will post not just their DNA, but also medical records and descriptions of their physical traits, says Forbes.

It’s an effort called the Personal Genome Project, in which the volunteers will relate the experience of having such personal information publicly available. Researchers want to determine the risks of DNA exposure, and learn how to develop software capable of managing human-scale DNA data volumes.

The ten volunteers are just the beginning. Researchers are in the process of recruiting the first 10,000 volunteers, on their way to 100,000 from the general public.

– read the Forbes article
– check out the project Internet site
– here are one volunteer’s annotation results
– see the intro video "

Open Access “propaganda”

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SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING & ACADEMIC RESEARCH COALITION

From the SPARC eNews December, 2009:  Opportunities to support open access:

Copenhagen COP15

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© flickr user Jams_123 licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
U.N. Climate Summit Under Way in Copenhagen
Leaders from across the globe convened today (Dec. 7th) in Copenhagen for a United Nations conference to discuss a plan to combat climate change. One of the goals of the summit, which runs through Dec. 18, is to work on a follow-up treaty to the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012.

Source: WhatsNew@NationalAcademies.org

Under the "Full Story", there are links to reports and a link to the conference website.