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It is not news that in order to make principled use of the data, ideas and knowledge from a scientific paper it is necessary to have read it. However, there are two immediate problems with this ostensibly simple fact. The first is that it is necessary to have access to the paper in the first place, and traditional publishing models require that the user needs to pay for this privilege – and not all can do so. The second is that even if one does have access to the paper, one potentially has access to millions of them (as I mention regularly, PubMed alone is increasing its list of peer-reviewed papers in biomedicine by two per minute!), so clearly any individual scientist (or layperson) needs means to prioritise those that they might wish to read. UKPubMedCentral (UKPMC) is a new service that is intended to provide them.
Continue reading: UKPubMedCentral – an Open Access digital library of biomedical science
This week was topped and tailed by University visits, the first being to the University of Exeter, who under the very able leadership of Vice Chancellor Steve Smith (who left Aber in 2002 at the same time as I did) and more proximately in Biology of Nick Talbot have grown their biosciences substantially and with great effect. Among the very interesting presentations were ones by Gero Steinberg, who (with his mathematical collaborator Peter Ashwin) has been developing and testing systems biology models (in a model organism, Ustilago maydis) of cytoskeleton-based trafficking that have completely changed their view of this. This was not an area I knew at all well, so it was illuminating to see this exciting combination of state-of-the-art cell imaging and numerical modelling. Murray Grant described a number of very interesting studies of plant defence, including new insights into the role of plant hormones, an improved knowledge of which aid considerably our work in Food Security, while John Love highlighted a programme co-funded by Shell in the area of third-generation biofuel production and Steve Bates, one of our New Investigator grantholders, described yeast cell cycle proteins that might make novel drug targets.
Continue reading: Universities, synthetic biology, digital publishing and translational medicine
As highlighted in the latest issue of Nature Reviews in Drug Discovery, the incubation phase of a new Open Access platform called Sage (www.sagebase.org) should begin on 1 July, 2009. The aim of this initiative, led by Stephen Friend and Eric Schadt who are leaving Merck to run it, is ‘to integrate large-scale biological information into models and then enable other scientists to leverage that information in an open access way’. It starts with a large chunk of data and information (especially expression profiling data) that they bring to the party.
Continue reading: Sage has its time; a large-scale open access resource for systems biologists
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