Monthly Archives: February 2014

Connacht Ulster Alliance demonstrates value in a shared consortium repository for smaller institutions

CUA Launch Repository on Open Repository's DSpace Platform

  James Evans, Product Manager Open Repository writes: The Connacht Ulster Alliance launched their repository on Tuesday February 18th, attended by staff and the Presidents of the three Institutes in the CUA. The CUA is a strategic partnership formed by Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT), Letterkenny Institute of Technology (LYIT) and  Institute of Technology, Sligo… Read more »

Technology

How should citizen science be published? A debate at Citizen Cyberscience Summit 2014

Fraxinus – each player contributes small but useful data helping to understand the cause and susceptibility to the ash dieback fungus

Citizen science – the public participation in gathering data for scientific studies – is certainly not new, but facilitated by the ease of sharing information online, the opportunities for the public to engage in scientific data collection have increased in recent years. Zooniverse, one of the most successful platforms facilitating citizen science experiments, recently announced that they now have over 1 million registered users (this map shows how geographically diverse they are), quite an impressive milestone to reach in just seven years.

But what are the implications of publishing scientific studies which, by definition, rely on the engagement of a broad group of participants?

BioMed Central is organising a panel discussion at the Citizen Cyberscience Summit to discuss this question, rounding off the second day of the conference in London this Friday.

Publishing
1

Nominate your research winners of 2013

RA-2012-Photos

Which research articles and researchers of 2013 deserve recognition? It’s a tough question to answer. Last year was another fantastic year for open access research, and not least here at BioMed Central. 25,000 articles were published with us, across topics as diverse as malaria metabolics, the genomics of chocolate, and the link between night work… Read more »

Publishing

Lights, Camera, ACTION! – EvoDevo introduces video to its PDFs

Fig 6 g' showing a DIC image of a cleavage arrested embryo

Guest blog post from Mark Martindale and Max Telford, Editors-in-Chief, EvoDevo Change over time is a central theme in biology, and of particular importance in the fields of developmental and evolutionary biology. Working at the interface of these fields, evodevo research frequently uses video recording as an important measure of specific biological events. Recognising the… Read more »

Biology Technology

The Force 11 Resource Identification Initiative and the Article of the Future

With the literature available to researchers growing—indeed, in the last decade the amount of articles published increased by around 44%[i]—the way in which researchers are able to consume that literature becomes increasingly important. Readers need ways to quickly find what research is relevant to them. For example, say I want to find all the literature… Read more »

Publishing Technology

Open Repository and OR Lite: ALA MidWinter Review

Open Repository Account Sales Manager Claire Bundy writes: “I had the pleasure, of recently attending the ALA Midwinter 2014 conference in Philadelphia, from where we operated an integrated BioMed Central booth. As integral parts of BioMed Central, both Open Repository and Papers ran workshops and provided numerous demonstrations of both services to a wide variety… Read more »

Technology