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December 26, 2006
Nature Ends Open Peer Review Experiment
Scientific journal Nature has announced plans to abandon an online experiment, which allowed scientists to comment on their peers' research before publication, due to lack of participation.
In a four-month trial, which began in June, a group of select scholars reviewed scientific manuscripts and decided what should appear in print. In the experiment, authors whose manuscripts were selected for traditional peer review could also opt to have them simultaneously posted on the Internet for feedback from scientists.
According to the British publication, although the experiment generated high online traffic, it was ultimately canceled because only a few authors participated and many of the online comments were nothing more than nice work.
Published by an arm of Macmillan Publishers Ltd., Nature is highly selective of the research it publishes. Of the 10,000 papers it receives every year, the journal rejects nearly 60 percent, and only about 7 percent of submissions are published.
From Knowledgespeak, 12/25/06
Posted by Katie Newman at 10:33 AM
December 20, 2006
Spring NCBI Courses
Keep these dates open!
April 4-5, 2007, the NCBI folks will return campus to offer two mini-courses (#6, EntrezGene Quick Start and #11, Microbial Genomes Quick Start), as well as a five-hour Structure Course.
Registration for these classes will be held in the Spring. I will send an email out to the following listservs, informing folks when registration is open:
- School of Life Sciences
- Veterinary Sciences
- ACES
- Bioengineering
- Bioinformatics
- Biotechnology Center
Note (1/5/2007): At a later date it's also possible they may come back to teach a course about the new PubChem database. Unfortunately, they couldn't squeeze this into their April schedule.
Drop me a line so I can be sure to let you know when registration opens, if you're not among those who regularly receive emails from me via one of these listservs.
Posted by Katie Newman at 3:59 PM
Online Access to The Chronicle of Higher Education
A little gift for the holidays!
We have just been able to establish campus-wide online access to The Chronicle for Higher Education ! This has come about as a result of our membership in CARLI, a state-wide academic library consortium.
Access is via IP recognition, so if you're on campus, you can just go to:
http://chronicle.com
If you're accessing it from off-campus, you'll need to access via the link in the Online Research Resources (the ORR), that is, via:
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=275135
so that you can be authenticated as a UIUC affiliate.
With our subscription to The Chronicle you will be able to read all the content on the site. You may also subscribe to the weekly Wired Campus newsletter email alerts, daily or weekly job alerts or daily RSS feeds for content. The only limitation of our site license vs an individual subscription is that you will not be allowed to subscribe to the daily e-mail alerts. See:
http://chronicle.com/services/email.htm
Note: there is a way to get weekly updates on the content in The Chronicle, or getting content focused on a particular topic. Contact me if you're interested: Katie Newman, florador@uiuc.edu!
Posted by Katie Newman at 3:56 PM
December 13, 2006
Concerned How Others May Use Your Word Documents?
Microsoft has created a free add-in that enables you to embed a Creative Commons copyright license into a document that you create using the Microsoft applications Word, PowerPoint, or Excel. With a Creative Commons license, authors can express their intentions regarding how their works may be used by others.
To learn more about Creative Commons, please visit its web site, www.creativecommons.org. To learn more about the choices among the Creative Commons licenses, see http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses.
Download the Creative Commons Microsoft Office add-in from the Microsoft website. For a short URL to this resource, use this tinyURL:
http://tinyurl.com/y9y634
Installation of the Creative Commons Microsoft Office add-in will add an option to your File menu whereby you can easily add the CC logo and usage statement to your document.
Posted by Katie Newman at 5:58 PM
December 12, 2006
iHOP: An Online Search Tool to Explore Genes in Biomedical Literature
From KnowledgeSpeak:
Researchers at the Computational Biology Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, US, have announced a new Internet tool for exploring scientific literature in medicine and biology. The freely accessible iHOP service provides fast, accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date summary information on over 80,000 biological molecules by automatically extracting key sentences from millions of PubMed documents when a search is requested. PubMed is a service of the US National Library of Medicine that includes more than 16 million citations from life science journals for biomedical articles.iHOP has reportedly become one of the most used resources for biomedical research, accessed by nearly 200,000 different users every month. The new version offers current information on more genes and chemical compounds, covering all organisms ranging from human and chimpanzee to yeast and HIV.
The search tool allows scientists to extract comprehensive information on the function of genes in signalling pathways, interaction networks and biological processes. It also allows researchers to explore a network of gene interactions by directly navigating the pool of published scientific literature. iHOP selectively retrieves information that is specific to genes and proteins and summarizes their interactions and functions. The system adds value by filtering and ranking extracted sentences according to significance, impact factor, date of publication and syntax.
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See:
http://www.ihop-net.org/UniPub/iHOP/
Note: For PubMed, UIUC users should use this URL:
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=406312
which will provide you with links for our "Discover" service, as well as authenicate you as a UIUC affiliate, for purposes of accessing e-journals.
Posted by Katie Newman at 11:59 AM