Open-Source 3D Morphing Software for Facial Plastic Surgery and Facial Landmark Detection Research and Open Access Face Data Set Based on Deep Learning (Artificial Intelligence) Generated Synthetic 3D Models | Facial Plastic Surgery & Aesthetic Medicine

“Abstract:  Background: The scarcity of 3D facial models presents a significant hurdle for researchers and educators. Gathering such data demands substantial resources.

Objective: To introduce an open-source 3D morphing software to generate 3D facial data sets for research and to provide a large sample data set that is based on synthetically generated 3D models.

Methods: Software is developed to morph 3D facial models in bulk by altering landmark locations. Twenty synthetic 3D facial models are generated utilizing deep learning tools and 28 landmarks located on each. The measurements of synthetic models are confirmed to be realistic by comparing them with facial statistics. Several facial deformities and types are simulated at various magnitudes on 3D models to generate a large data set.

Results: An open-source software and an open-access data set of 980 3D facial models, each with 28 landmark locations, are provided. Since the data set is based on synthetically generated 3D models, no institutional review board approval is required.

Conclusion: The 3D morphing software and the large 3D data set are expected to benefit researchers and educators in the field of facial surgery and facial landmark detection.

Carrots and Sticks: A Qualitative Study of Library Responses to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 Open Access Policy | DeSanto | College & Research Libraries

Abstract:  This study examines how academic libraries in the UK responded to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 open access policy. Thirteen information professionals at twelve institutions across the UK took part in semi-structured interviews. Findings from the interviews reveal how libraries created and deployed new infrastructures, workflows, and staffing as well as the methods through which universities communicated the policy’s requirements. The study describes respondents’ experiences of the changes brought about by REF 2021 as well as their thoughts on how the REF 2021 open access policy will affect future REF assessments. Results provide insight for libraries responding to US initiatives such as the August 2022 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memo directing the open publishing of federally funded research.

 

Letter from the Editor-in-Chief: Neurotherapeutics’ Transition to Gold Open Access | SpringerLink

“Beginning with the January 2024 issue, Neurotherapeutics will become a fully Open Access journal in keeping with the overall trend in scientific publishing. Over the years, the official journal of the American Society for Experimental Neurotherapeutics (ASENT) has gone through a number of transitions regarding its publishing model, beginning with traditional subscription-based print journal paid by libraries, universities, and other institutions, then hybrid online publishing with both subscription and open access options, and now moving to fully open access where the cost of publishing will be covered by authors, their funders, or institutions. Invited articles will not be subject to Article Processing Charges. Along with this change, Elsevier will now be the new publisher of Neurotherapeutics.”

A Large Open Access Dataset of Brain Metastasis 3D Segmentations with Clinical and Imaging Feature Information – PMC

Abstract:  Resection and whole brain radiotherapy (WBRT) are the standards of care for the treatment of patients with brain metastases (BM) but are often associated with cognitive side effects. Stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) involves a more targeted treatment approach and has been shown to avoid the side effects associated with WBRT. However, SRS requires precise identification and delineation of BM. While many AI algorithms have been developed for this purpose, their clinical adoption has been limited due to poor model performance in the clinical setting. Major reasons for non-generalizable algorithms are the limitations in the datasets used for training the AI network. The purpose of this study was to create a large, heterogenous, annotated BM dataset for training and validation of AI models to improve generalizability. We present a BM dataset of 200 patients with pretreatment T1, T1 post-contrast, T2, and FLAIR MR images. The dataset includes contrast-enhancing and necrotic 3D segmentations on T1 post-contrast and whole tumor (including peritumoral edema) 3D segmentations on FLAIR. Our dataset contains 975 contrast-enhancing lesions, many of which are sub centimeter, along with clinical and imaging feature information. We used a streamlined approach to database-building leveraging a PACS-integrated segmentation workflow.

 

Open access journal publication in health and medical research and open science: benefits, challenges and limitations | BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine

“Scientific progress, including in evidence-based medicine, requires all available evidence to be accessed, scrutinised, interpreted and used. Missing or incomplete evidence creates biases and errors in later research. Open science practices are movements and procedures that aim to increase transparency in science production. They aim to make scientific knowledge available, accessible and reusable, benefitting scientific collaboration and all society.1 Open access is a core component of open science that aims to help solve the problem of accessibility.2

Traditional publication behind a paywall can hide evidence from the public, clinicians, policymakers and other researchers. Whether online or print, traditional scientific journals maintain their content behind a paywall, with only abstracts freely available to read.3 Readers access articles by purchasing the individual article, the entire journal issue or through a subscription. These journal subscriptions are purchased by institutions like universities and libraries. However, readers whose institutions cannot afford these subscriptions or who are not affiliated to an institution are often unable to pay to access every article they need. Members of the public and readers in low-resourced countries are disproportionately affected.4

 

 

Open access is defined as making a document freely available for anyone to read and, depending on the licence model, share and use (Box 1). Scholarly publishers now offer open access routes for publishing journal articles such as protocols, commentaries, reviews and result articles. The academic community expects these publishers to adhere to the same quality standards as in traditional closed access publication, such as peer review, indexing and permanent archiving. Biomedical research has progressively adopted open access, with yearly increases in the percentage of articles available as open access publications and the number of countries and policies mandating open access.5 6 Online supplemental text 1 summarises national and international open access mandates….”

Open Access Conversations | Five minutes with Niamh Tumelty | LSE Press

“At LSE Library, I want to continue digging into Open Science and really trying to understand what open social science looks like when it is beneficial to the discipline.

As a sector, academic publishing is too dependent on making a profit. This doesn’t always act in line with the needs of researchers and can lead to decisions made for commercial reasons rather than reflecting the needs of the academy. Open Access university presses, such as LSE Press, help to create opportunities for researchers to work with a press that is aligned with what their values are, and to maximise access to their work without scrimping on quality. The output of LSE Press is high quality, peer-reviewed books and journal articles which can be used to promote social science research to the widest possible audience.

I’m really excited about the fact that LSE Press focuses on the social sciences specifically. There is a much more focused target audience which is helpful for building our brand and establishing ourselves as a leading publisher….”

ACM Announces New Open Access Publishing Model for the International Conference Proceedings Series

“ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has announced it will transition its International Conference Proceedings Series (ICPS) to a fully Open Access (OA) publishing model beginning January 1, 2024. Making its ICPS program Open Access represents an important step in ACM’s comprehensive shift to full OA publication of all content in the ACM Digital Library, which is planned for completion by December 2025….

The ACM International Conference Proceeding Series (ICPS) provides a mechanism for publishing the contents of high-quality conferences, technical symposia and workshops in the ACM Digital Library, the world’s leading repository of computer science research, thereby increasing their visibility among the international computing community.

ACM has published more than 75,000 research papers in the ACM Digital Library (DL) from over 2,000 conferences through the ICPS program since it was established in 2002. All ICPS published articles appear in the DL and are assigned digital object identifiers (DOIs), enhancing discovery, enabling persistent reference linking and archiving in digital preservation repositories, all while ensuring perpetual access. Publication in the ACM DL ensures high visibility. The ACM DL averages over 4 million unique users from 195 countries every month. On average, users generate 4.4 million page views and 1.75 million downloads each month….”

The American Chemical Society Offers a New Twist on the Article Processing Charge: An Interview with Sarah Tegen – The Scholarly Kitchen

“Will the author have the option of withdrawing at this point, if s/he doesn’t have funds to cover the ADC? Or does the author commit to the ADC payment before the manuscript is sent out for review?

We expect a very small number of authors to elect the ADC — in the range of about 200 per year out of 200,000 annual manuscript submissions.  If an author cannot pay the ADC, they can continue on their publishing journey, but they will need to wait to post their accepted manuscript for 12 months.

Is the ADC the same amount as the APC paid by funded authors? If not, how is the difference calculated? 

The ADC is a flat fee of $2,500 for our hybrid journals, and it covers the costs associated with the many publishing services provided from submission to final editorial decision. This includes organizing, maintaining, and investing in the high-quality scholarly peer review process and multiple other services provided by an expansive global network of editors and reviewers. These costs are significant, comprising more than 50% of the overall cost of publishing the final version of record. …

To ask what is such an obvious question that it might be stupid: how does an unfunded author (who therefore presumably can’t afford an APC) benefit from being charged an ADC instead? 

Assisting authors to get published is our North Star, and we’re introducing this ADC option to help authors navigate shifting funder mandates. Funders, institutions, and publishers agree there is a real cost to scholarly publishing, and choosing an OA option is entirely voluntary. The ADC ensures the long-term integrity and quality of content published in ACS journals. We also provide cost-free pathways to publish for all authors.  

Through the read and publish agreements we have with thousands of institutions worldwide, we have shielded authors from the costs of meeting funder requirements for gold OA. These enable authors to post the final version of record to repositories immediately after publication. ACS Publications already allows those authors who cannot publish via the gold OA route to post the accepted manuscript to a repository 12 months after publication at no cost. Authors may also choose to publish through subscription access journals at no cost to them.

For authors not covered by a read and publish agreement or another pathway, our zero-embargo green OA pathway will provide an additional option to immediately share the accepted manuscript while offsetting the costs incurred to ensure the quality, value, and integrity of the research during the publishing process.”

Unlike an article publishing charge (APC), the ADC does not cover expenses related to final production, digital distribution, discovery, and hosting of the version of record or maintaining post-publication updates. For those authors who later decide to publish fully OA, the amount of the ADC will be deducted from the cost of the gold APC. Authors will not pay more than the APC required for gold OA. ADC waivers or discounts will be automatically applied to papers from corresponding authors from all countries that currently receive special country pricing for APCs….”

Community input on Open Peer Review, trust and diversity

“With this short survey, we would like to solicit community input for our project at this year’s Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI2023). In our project, we will be studying the way in which Open Peer Review (OPR) models can contribute to diversity and trust in research. With OPR, we are particularly referring to modes of peer review in which actors’ identities are revealed (Open Identities), peer review reports are openly shared (Open Reports), or non-invited stakeholders are able to participate (Open Participation). While these models of peer review have the potential to contribute to diversity, equity and inclusion, their efficacy is still largely unknown. We are therefore curious to hear your thoughts on potential benefits or risks of OPR in your community, as well as open questions that you would like to see addressed.”

The Great Varieties of PIDs and How to Use Them: Navigating the Persistent Identifier Landscape

“DataCite, ORCID, and Crossref as international open scholarly infrastructure are adopted globally, but in APAC, national level PID providers also share the vision and work with their respective local communities to build services and tools to help them achieve data management goals. We are spoiled by the thriving PIDs ecosystem with PIDs for different types of entities, different levels of technical interoperability, different governance model, different user community, etc. – When the time comes to build an optimal PID integration or adoption strategy, how should one navigate the landscape?

Join the continued conversation in the Better Together APAC webinar series to dive into the topic of working with multiple PIDs, hear from DataCite, Crossref and ORCID, as well as organizations that have all ready built and implemented strategies that synergize the strength of different PIDs to provide their communities with the flexibility to meet varied use cases, making them truly better, together.”

Journals That Ban Replications–Are They Serious Scholarly Outlets At All?

“Here’s the problem, and it’s true for science as much as it’s true for coworkers, spouses, or anyone else: Trust can only be earned, not demanded. And one of the most critical places where scientists, journals, and funders could earn that trust is by giving more prominence to replications and reanalyses that expose prior scientific errors….

In some cases, to be sure, a letter to the editor might suffice for minor corrections, and journal editors obviously have the responsibility to make sure that a failed replication is indeed accurate and important enough to publish. 

But in the case of failed replications that expose obvious errors in the original article, a short letter will likely be inadequate to address the journal’s earlier mistake. We all know that such letters won’t be as widely read, and the original article will probably still be cited and read nearly as often (indeed, in psychology, the publication of a failed replication only makes the citation rate of the original article go down by 14%, and another study even found that non-replicable papers are cited at a higher rate than replicable papers).

What these medical and health journals are saying, however, is that they place a higher priority on citations and audience interest than on publishing replications. Put another way, they prefer popularity over truth, when the two are in conflict.

 

This is not a respectable scientific position, nor does it deserve public trust….”

Replication games: how to make reproducibility research more systematic

“In the replication games, a team might attempt to reproduce this paper by re-running the same analysis while making their own decisions about appropriate methods, control groups and so on.

The team might attempt to replicate it by asking whether the result remains the same if more states are used in the comparison group, or if the date range is extended to between 2015 and 2023, using data from the same survey. Or the researchers might use another survey that provides similar data to perform their replication.

Teams are formed one month before the games. Replicators read the paper and develop a plan that will allow them to do the bulk of the work on the day of the games. After the event, the replicators complete any leftover work and write a short report on their findings, which is shared with the original authors for their comments before the findings are made public….”

‘A Toolkit for Knowledge Rights Advocacy’ – KR21 Workshop Report – LIBER Europe

“During the LIBER Annual Conference in July, Knowledge Rights 21 held the workshop “A Toolkit for Knowledge Rights Advocacy”. Organisers Stephen Wyber (Director of Policy and Advocacy, IFLA) and Giannis Tsakonas (Director, Library & Information Centre, University of Patras and LIBER Vice President) took an engaging and interactive approach to trigger participants’ reflections and motivate them to join the growing KR21 movement. KR21 is advocating for progressive and positive change in the way we provide access to knowledge – both on the ground and through legal reform….”

The White House Office of Science & Technology Policy Open Science Recognition Challenge” Recognizing open science stories to benefit society

“The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), in collaboration with federal agencies participating in a Year of Open Science, invite researchers, community scientists, educators, innovators, and members of the broader public to share stories of how they’ve advanced equitable open science….

By emphasizing the narrative aspect of open science, this challenge aims to capture the multifaceted and nuanced nature of open science, as well as the breadth of people and organizations engaging in it, inviting readers into the human side of science and inspire them to pursue their open science projects of their own. Entrants may submit their open science stories for recognition in one or more of the following categories: …”