The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Chief Executive Dr Robert Parker has welcomed the announcement of £250 million allocation by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) as the first phase of a five year strategic investment programmes.
The RSC chief said it was an important step towards tackling many of the global challenges outlined in Chemistry for Tomorrow’s World: a roadmap for the chemical sciences, adding that chemists will be pivotal figures in many of the institutes and programmes being funded.
The BBSRC investment includes 26 strategic science programmes and 14 key national research capabilities, to be delivered by eight of the UK’s world-leading bioscience research institutes and their university partners.
To complement the crossover in science disciplines highlighted by the announcement, the RSC recently launched its new journal, Biomaterials Science. The journal will feature high-impact research bridging materials science, biology, chemistry and physics. The journal expects to publish the first online articles in the third quarter of 2012.
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Academic Senate has voted to make electronic versions of current and future scientific articles freely available to the public. The move is projected to reverse decades of practice on the part of medical and scientific journal publishers to restrict access to research results.
The unanimous vote of the faculty senate makes UCSF the largest scientific institution in the US to adopt an open access (OA) policy and among the first public universities to do so.
UCSF is the US’ largest public recipient of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), receiving 1,056 grants last year, valued at $532.8 million. Research from those and other grants leads to more than 4,500 scientific papers each year in highly regarded, peer-reviewed scientific journals. However, a majority of these papers are only available to subscribers who pay subscription fees. The 10-campus University of California (UC) system spends close to $40 million each year to buy access to journals.
Such restrictions and costs have been cited among the obstacles in translating scientific advances from laboratory research into improved clinical care.
The new policy requires UCSF faculty to make each of their articles freely available immediately through an OA repository, thereby providing access to the public through search engines such as Google Scholar. Articles will be deposited in a UC repository, other national OA repositories such as the NIH-sponsored PubMed Central, or published as OA publications. They will then be available to be read, downloaded, mined, or distributed without barriers.
Under terms negotiated with the NIH, some of the premier journals only allow open access in PubMed Central one year after publication; prior to that only the titles and summaries of articles are freely available. How such journals will handle the UCSF policy remains to be seen.
The UCSF policy gives the university a nonexclusive licence to distribute any peer-reviewed articles that will also be published in scientific or medical journals. Researchers are able to ‘opt out’ if they want to publish in a certain journal but find that the publisher is unwilling to comply with the UCSF policy.
The UCSF vote was the result of a faculty-led initiative, and makes it the first campus in the UC system to implement such a policy. It has been developed in collaboration with other UC campuses and systemwide committees, especially the UC Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, with the ultimate goal of implementing the policy across all ten UC campuses.
STM publisher Thieme Publishing Group, Germany, has released Thieme Bookshelf, the free companion app to Thieme's English language E-Book Store (ebookstore.thieme.com). The E-Book Store allows customers to choose from among hundreds of e-books offering the latest medical content.
The bookshelf enables customers to easily browse through the contents of the store or their personal library, tap a book to open it, flip through pages with a swipe or a tap, and bookmark or add notes to their favourite passages within a book. The app is available on the iTunes App Store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/thieme-bookshelf
Thieme now has over 500 ebooks available on ebookstore.thieme.com, and the collection will continuously grow as new titles are published. Once users download Thieme Bookshelf to their iPad and enter their ebookstore account details, they will automatically have access to all the ebooks they’ve purchased from Thieme’s E-Book Store and be able to access new ones as they purchase them.
The Institute of Physics (IOP) has announced the appointment of Prof. Paul Hardaker as the new Chief Executive. Prof. Hardaker will take up his new post on September 3, 2012.
Professor Hardaker has been Chief Executive of the Royal Meteorological Society since October 2006. Prior to this, he worked at the Met Office for 14 years as both Programme Director for the Met Office’s Development Programmes, and as the Met Office’s Chief Advisor to Government. Alongside these posts, Professor Hardaker has been a member of the Physics Advisor Panel at the University of Wales and founding editor of the international journal Atmospheric Science Letters.
Paul currently holds a visiting Professorship in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Reading, He is a Trustee on the Board of Science Council and Chairman of Sense About Science, as well as a regular contributor to TV, radio and his own blog.
Outside of his work in meteorology, Paul has held a number of non-executive positions including a Non-Executive Directorship of a City company working in risk management and in the NHS as Deputy Chair of the Board of NHS Berkshire West, where he was actively involved with local and regional healthcare initiatives.
Professor Hardaker will take over as CEO of IOP from Dr Robert Kirby-Harris, who retires on June 12.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced the election of Vinton G. Cerf as president for a two-year term, beginning July 1. Prior to his election as ACM president, Cerf was a member-at-large on the ACM Council.
Cerf, who is Chief Internet Evangelist at Google Inc., said his vision as president is to take advantage of the global networking infrastructure to invite open dialog with ACM's worldwide membership. He also noted the need to increase the accessibility and utility of ACM’s burgeoning online content, which includes its publications and conferences. He currently serves as General Chair of the ACM Turing Centenary Celebration, to be held June 15-16 in San Francisco, CA.
Also elected to two-year terms were Vice President Alexander L. Wolf of Imperial College London, UK, and Secretary-Treasurer Vicki L. Hanson of the University of Dundee, Scotland. In addition, Members-at-Large elected to four-year terms include Eric Allman, chief science officer for Sendmail Inc.; Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Yahoo! vice president of Research for Europe and Latin America; Radia Perlman, director of Network Technology at Intel; Mary Lou Soffa, professor and chair of the University of Virginia Computer Science Department; and Eugene H. Spafford, professor at Purdue University and executive director of the Purdue Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), and chair of the ACM US Public Policy Council.
The new officers elected by ACM professional members represent the more than 100,000 computing professionals and students who comprise ACM's international membership. They pledged to continue ACM's international growth with the expansion of regional councils to developing countries, and to strengthen ACM's influence in shaping the computing profession as a source of innovation and advances that benefit society.
Future Medicine Ltd., part of Future Science Group, UK, has announced a further addition to its journal portfolio with the launch of a new bimonthly title, Breast Cancer Management. The journal seeks to provide a rapid-publication platform for debate and the presentation of new findings in the field of breast cancer treatment.
Breast Cancer Management addresses key issues in disease management by exploring the best patient-centered clinical research and presenting this information both directly, as clinical findings, and in practice-oriented formats of direct relevance in the clinic. The journal also highlights significant advances in basic and translational research, and places them in context for future therapy.
The Editorial Board comprises global opinion leaders in breast cancer research and clinical practice, selected specifically to ensure a balanced range of expertise that covers all clinical disciplines, as well as translational researchers involved in breast cancer management. Senior Editors V. Craig Jordan from Georgetown University Medical Center, US, and Mike Dixon from University of Edinburgh, UK, are supported by two Associate Editors, together with an Advisory Panel of 26 international experts.
The editorial office is now actively soliciting contributions of reviews, perspectives and editorial articles for the journal.
Designed by the Charlesworth Group, NCCNChina.org.cn currently features the NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology (NCCN Guidelines) - China Editions. Based on the NCCN Guidelines, the China Editions comprise the extensive expertise of more than 100 Chinese cancer specialists in collaboration with NCCN panel experts.
The China Editions contain recommendations revised specifically to account for genetic, pharamacological, and regulatory considerations of the Chinese population.
The NCCN, a not-for-profit alliance of 21 of the world's leading cancer centers, is dedicated to improving the quality and effectiveness of care provided to patients with cancer.
Accelrys, Inc., a US-based scientific enterprise R&D software and services company, has announced that it is enabling up to 400 scientists at 16 UK universities to evaluate the Contur Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN). Projected as a low-cost, easy-to-deploy and use ELN, the tool is offered by Accelrys' Contur Software subsidiary.
The programme, which runs through the end of September 2012, is seen to facilitate growing academic interest in improving quality of research, IP protection and collaboration through the use of ELNs. The scalability, rapid deployment and affordable price point of the Contur ELN is said to make robust ELN deployments a reality for academia.
Supported by the 'Dial-a-Molecule' Grand Challenge Network funded by the UK government's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the Contur ELN programme is stated to be the largest multi-institutional academic ELN trial ever undertaken. It is also the first academic ELN trial spanning chemistry, biology and engineering and the only academic trial that enables cross-functional teams to collaborate effectively using a scalable cloud- and web-based ELN featuring Accelrys' chemistry capabilities.
BA Insight, a US-based provider of integrated search technologies and search-based applications, has announced a partnership with metasearch technology provider MuseGlobal, Inc., US. As a result of the partnership, BA Insight has expanded the number of content sources it can securely integrate into its TotalView Applications. These are projected as search-driven and role-specific solutions built atop the Microsoft SharePoint platform that integrate an organisation's various data sources to provide knowledge workers with a 360-view of any topic, task, or subject matter.
Under the terms of the partnership, MuseGlobal's library of connectors to hundreds of 'beyond the firewall' content sources - including Internet databases, digital news sources and online libraries - will now be added to BA Insight's existing library of connectors to over 40+ enterprise systems. This will enable BA Insight to deliver TotalView applications that surface and fuse content from not only all of an organisation's internal systems, but also all of the external data streams, news feeds and proprietary information services it needs to make informed decisions.
BA Insight's TotalView applications are said to deliver the same 'contextual' search experience that users have grown accustomed to in the consumer space - where search-driven applications like Expedia.com and Zagat.com not only surface information from across multiple sources, but also present that information in a manner customised to the user, his/her role, location, and objective(s). Because TotalView applications are built atop of - and integrate seamlessly with - Microsoft SharePoint and/or FAST Search for SharePoint, they can be deployed at a fraction of the time and cost associated with traditional data integration or business intelligence initiatives. TotalView applications have been deployed by organisations of all types and sizes, to meet the needs of a of a variety of business processes — including customer call centre consoles, attorney matter & client-centric information centres, and intelligence analysts' workbenches.
RSC chief welcomes BBSRC investment in UK bioscience
UCSF clears policy to make research papers freely accessible to public
Thieme releases Thieme Bookshelf app