Posts by Angela Wipperman

G8 science ministers’ recommendations on access to research

Angela Wipperman on June 17, 2013 at 4:42 pm - 0 Comments

As preparations were underway in Northern Ireland for the 39th G8 summit, science ministers from the G8 nations met with their national science academies to discuss the most pressing issues in research facing scientists across the globe.

Their recommendations will be put to the G8 leaders during talks today and tomorrow. Among them are decisive actions required to make scientific research more open and more accessible.

In a statement released on June 13, the group note that: ‘Open enquiry is at the heart of scientific endeavour, and rapid technological change has profound implications for the way that science is both conducted and its results communicated’. They go on to state their support for a clear set of …

Nobel prize-winning lab releases mutant mouse data to the public domain

Angela Wipperman on October 24, 2012 at 4:12 pm - 0 Comments

N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea (ENU) is a highly mutagenic chemical used in the laboratory for inducing changes in DNA and allowing study of the impact of that change. A team of researchers from the Department of Genetics at The Scripps Research Institute and Southwestern Medical Center’s Center for Genetics of Host Defense, have published a data note in BMC Research Notes, providing the data from over a decade of work to identify 185 phenotypes tracked to ENU induced mutations in 129 genes. Working on the project was Professor Bruce Beutler, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2011, who says of the work: “Over a period of eleven years we accumulated hundreds of mutations, induced …

Trial reporting: BioMed Central discusses innovation through open access publishing in Pharmaphorum

Angela Wipperman on July 31, 2012 at 4:45 am - 0 Comments

We at BioMed Central are working at the forefront of clinical trial reporting. In an article for Pharmaphorum, the news and community site for research in pharma, we discuss the opportunities for clinical trial development and dissemination offered by open access publishing.

The article discusses the steps taken by our trial register database and our open access journals, including our dedicated clinical trial journal Trials, to improve transparency and reporting in clinical trials. Launched in 2006, Trials has published almost 900 study protocols, results, methodologies and editorials covering a broad scope of clinical trials. The journal has been tackling gaps in trial reporting with innovative solutions, such as the Update article, designed to provide a citable …

Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods and Open Network Biology – a DREAM partnership

Angela Wipperman on June 29, 2012 at 12:35 pm - 0 Comments

Guest blog post from Gustavo Solovitzky, chair of the DREAM7 conference and the DREAM project, which has partnered with Open Network Biology, BioMed Central’s new open access journal publishing predictive, network-based models. One of the goals of the DREAM challenges has been to task researchers with deducing network models from complex data.

On June 12, 2012 we launched the 7th edition of the Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods also known as the DREAM7 Challenges. What started in 2006 as an effort to understand the strengths and limitations of various methods for the reverse engineering of biological networks from high-throughput data has evolved into yearly challenges that invite the scientific community to think …

Sage Bionetworks 3rd Commons Congress

Angela Wipperman on April 5, 2012 at 5:46 am - 0 Comments

The internet, and the technology it has facilitated, has revolutionised the way we all share information and the effects are no more profound than in the sciences. Sage Bionetworks, a not-for-profit organisation based in Washington state, is just one example of the utilisation of technology and the web to advance learning and drive research. The organisation, founded by Stephen Friend and Eric Schadt, aims to link and co-ordinate academic and commercial biomedical researchers, facilitating the sharing of research and data to elucidate the genetic causes of disease.

In April this year, Sage Bionetworks will host the third Commons Congress, which will focus on how far the technical and legal foundations laid to support data sharing have gone to …

Systematic Reviews journal launches today

Angela Wipperman on February 9, 2012 at 5:18 am - 0 Comments

Systematic Reviews, a new journal in the BioMed Central portfolio, launches today. The journal, headed by Editors-in-Chief David Moher, Lesley Stewart and Paul Shekelle, aims to encompass all aspects of the design, conduct and reporting of systematic reviews.

As the first open access journal to focus on systematic reviews and associated literature, Systematic Reviews aims to publish high quality systematic review products including systematic review protocols, systematic reviews related to a very broad definition of health, rapid reviews, updates of already completed systematic reviews, and methods research related to the science of systematic reviews, such as decision modeling. The journal also aims to ensure that the results of all well-conducted systematic reviews are published, regardless of their outcome.

The journal supports …

Journal of Medical Case Reports publishes its 2000th case report

Angela Wipperman on February 6, 2012 at 11:27 am - 0 Comments

Journal of Medical Case Reports publishes its 2000th case report today. Since its launch in 2007, the journal has provided a venue for medically important case reports and case series, publishing articles on a range of conditions as diverse as liver toxicity associated with chemotherapy treatment, and acute paranoid psychotic behaviour arising from manganese exposure.

In this 2000th case report from Gahr et al., the authors hypothesize that melperone-augmented haloperidol can be considered as a possible treatment strategy in patients with schizophrenia who have CYP2D6 ultrarapid metabolization status and who experience an insufficient antipsychotic effect with amisulpride.

Editor-in-Chief, Professor Michael Kidd, says of the journal’s 2000th case: ‘The report is typical of many of the case reports …

Browsing by subject with Journal of Medical Case Reports

Angela Wipperman on December 20, 2011 at 5:59 am - 0 Comments

We have introduced a new feature for Journal of Medical Case Reports, which will enhance readers’ experience and make it easier to identify cases of interest in a rapidly-growing, broad-scope medical journal.

Visitors to the journal website can now find articles of interest using the browse by subject tab, within the ‘Articles’ section of the site. Browsing by subject will help our readers to quickly find case reports that are most relevant to their specific clinical and research areas. In grouping articles into broad subject areas, such as surgery, oncology and paediatrics, we hope to save the time spent manually searching through all of the interesting reports published in the journal, and instead highlight those more specific cases. …

Five years of Trials

Angela Wipperman on November 23, 2011 at 10:33 am - 0 Comments

Trials celebrates its 5th birthday this year. In Trials’ launch editorial, Editors-in-Chief Doug Altman, Curt Furberg, Jeremy Grimshaw and Peter Rothwell wrote of the importance of trial reporting, and announced that a key aim of the journal was not only to promote and encourage the reporting of all randomized controlled trials (RCTs), but to make this information freely available online.

Half a decade later, Trials has published more than 600 open access articles. Of these articles, 500 are study protocols, important records of ongoing RCTs for which Trials has become a prominent venue. Protocols like the ARTIS-Trial study design by Zinkstok et al. are important for ensuring transparency for clinical trials and providing a marker against which …