NBII To Be Taken Offline Permanently January 15, 2012

“In recent years, however, the NBII–like so many other important federal programs–was plagued with budget cuts. The FY 2012 budget mandated its termination. The main Web site, www.nbii.gov, will be taken offline on January 15, 2012, along with all of its associated node sites.

The NBII provided three main benefits to the biological resource community. First, its design as a federation of partners allowed it to assist data owners in maintaining critical assets that might not otherwise be made broadly available; second, scientists, managers, and others searching for data on a particular subject could do so from a single, Web-based source rather than having to go to the sites of numerous organizations to compile the results they sought; and third, the NBII provided users with direct access to many data resources that are deeply embedded in structured databases on the Web and that are relevant to biology–resources that would not be revealed to them using a standard search engine such as Google.

USGS staff now are working with partners to identify ways that–to the extent possible–will help to fill the gap in data access that will be created when the NBII goes offline.”

To read more about the National Biological Information Infrastructure, here’s a link from which the above quote was taken:

http://www.usgs.gov/core_science_systems/Access/p1111-1.html

A Postscript:

“The Library of Congress is a part of a collaborative web archive project to archive U.S. Federal Government Websites, and this site has been crawled by the Internet Archive as a part of that project. It is not publicly accessible yet but it has been preserved.

 

Since we’re a part of the collaborative project, we’ll eventually get a copy of that capture for the Library of Congress archives.”

 

/mrc (Margaret Clifton, mcli@loc.gov)

 

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

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.

Institute for Web Science (UK) not to get funding…

However, [Tim] "Berners-Lee and [Nigel] Shadbolt are hopeful that earlier statements and commitments by members of the new government to open government data indicate that support for open-linked data initiatives will continue, despite the cuts. They believe that the http://data.gov.uk website, a similar initiative to the U.S. government’s www.data.gov portal, will continue to grow over the coming months. The U.S. service now has more than 270,000 data sets available for developers. The U.K. version is somewhat smaller with a little more than 3,000 data sets."

Source:  Jim Ashling. Information Today. Medford: Jul/Aug 2010. Vol. 27, Iss. 7; pg. 20, 2 pgs

http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?RQT=569&curl=http%3A%2F%2Fproquest.umi.com%2Fpqdweb%3Fdid%3D2080617381%26sid%3D1%26Fmt%3D3%26clientId%3D17210%26RQT%3D309%26VName%3DPQD&TS=1279289390  (whole article)

NSF requests data sharing plans with grant applications

"National Science Foundation Sets Rules for Sharing Data

The National Science Foundation will soon begin requiring all grant applicants to submit a two-page plan describing how they will manage and share any data that is accumulated as part of their grant, in the latest example of a growing effort to ensure public access to findings financed with taxpayer dollars, Science magazine’s ScienceInsider blog reported."

Source:  Chronicle of Higher Education, May 7, 2010, via Jane Holmquist