Open and reusable annotated mass spectrometry dataset of a chemodiverse collection of 1,600 plant extracts | GigaScience | Oxford Academic

Abstract:  As privileged structures, natural products often display potent biological activities. However, the discovery of novel bioactive scaffolds is often hampered by the chemical complexity of the biological matrices they are found in. Large natural extract collections are thus extremely valuable for their chemical novelty potential but also complicated to exploit in the frame of drug-discovery projects. In the end, it is the pure chemical substances that are desired for structural determination purposes and bioactivity evaluation. Researchers interested in the exploration of large and chemodiverse extract collections should thus establish strategies aiming to efficiently tackle such chemical complexity and access these structures. Establishing carefully crafted digital layers documenting the spectral and chemical complexity as well as bioactivity results of natural extracts collections can help prioritize time-consuming but mandatory isolation efforts. In this note, we report the results of our initial exploration of a collection of 1,600 plant extracts in the frame of a drug-discovery effort. After describing the taxonomic coverage of this collection, we present the results of its liquid chromatography high-resolution mass spectrometric profiling and the exploitation of these profiles using computational solutions. The resulting annotated mass spectral dataset and associated chemical and taxonomic metadata are made available to the community, and data reuse cases are proposed. We are currently continuing our exploration of this plant extract collection for drug-discovery purposes (notably looking for novel antitrypanosomatids, anti-infective and prometabolic compounds) and ecometabolomics insights. We believe that such a dataset can be exploited and reused by researchers interested in computational natural products exploration.

 

Say Hello to Anno : Hypothesis | 18 Aug 2022

“It’s been 11 years since we launched Hypothesis. It’s gone by so fast. During this time, we’ve accomplished many things: We defined a vision for open web annotation, we built an open source framework to implement it, we helped form and lead the working group that shipped the W3C standard, and we launched a service that’s now used by over a million people around the world who have made nearly 40 million annotations. In higher education, more than 1,200 colleges and universities use Hypothesis. And we’ve grown from a handful of people into a team of more than 35 passionate web builders. We’re not stopping here.

We’ve always had our sights set on the bigger idea: that this still-nascent effort can blossom into a true network of interoperable services — a rich ecosystem of collaboration, conversation and community over all knowledge. We believe that when incentives are aligned toward quality and away from monetizing attention, we can produce something of profound social importance. A utility layer for humanity. Since launch, the Hypothesis Project has been incorporated as a nonprofit. And while our nonprofit was an excellent home for our mission, it also limited us to grants and donations. Though we were beginning to provide services that we could charge for, we still needed capital to expand. Frustratingly, while our needs were growing, several of the key funding sources we’d relied on were no longer available to us as they shuttered programs or changed strategies. In 2019, we and others formed Invest In Open Infrastructure (IOI), an “initiative to dramatically increase the amount of funding available to open scholarly infrastructure.” We recruited Kaitlin Thaney to that effort, and she has been doing a terrific job laying the foundation for this. But all this would take time we didn’t have.

In response, and to better position us to achieve our long-held mission, we’ve formed Anno, a public benefit corporation (aka “Annotation Unlimited, PBC”) that shares the Hypothesis mission as well as its team. We’ve done this so that we can take investment in a mission aligned way and scale the Hypothesis service to meet the opportunity in front of us. Anno is funded by a $14M seed round that includes a $2.5M investment from ITHAKA, the nonprofit provider of JSTOR, a digital library that serves more than 13,000 education institutions around the world, providing access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images and primary sources in 75 disciplines. Also participating in the round are At.inc, Triage Ventures, Esther Dyson, Mark Pincus and others. ITHAKA’s president, Kevin Guthrie, has joined Anno’s board as an observer….”

Recommendations on the Transformation of Academic Publishing: Towards Open Access

“Three central arguments support this transformation: 1 ? Openly accessible publications can be read, reviewed and used more quickly and more widely by other researchers. This increases the quality of research and accelerates scientific progress. 2 ? OA makes scientific knowledge more widely available outside of the scientific community and lowers the threshold for various transfer activities. This increases the social effectiveness of (publicly funded) research. 3 ? Up to now, the business model of publishers has been based on rights of use. As they will no longer be granted exclusive rights under OA, publishers will become publication service providers and will compete with other providers. This may strengthen the negotiating position of scientific institutions vis-à-vis such service providers and improve the innovative capacity, cost transparency and cost efficiency of the publication system.

As far as the Council is concerned, the goal of the transformation is for academic publications to be made freely available immediately, permanently, at the original publication venue and in the citable, peer-reviewed and typeset version of record under an open licence (CC BY). This so-called gold route to OA (gold OA) is compatible with various business models…. 

For orientation in this market, the Council recommends that the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany agree on common requirements for quality assurance of content (especially in terms of peer review processes) as well as for high-quality publication services. In the medium term, academic publications should not only be openly accessible, but also machine-readable through open, structured formats and semantic annotations….

“Gold OA” should not be equated with funding via article processing charges (APC)….

As the WR sees it, all third-party funders are obliged to fully finance the publication costs arising from publishing the results of the research they are funding….”

 

Read and Annotate with UM Press – University of Michigan Press Blog

“The University of Michigan Press is launching a new social annotation project: UM Press Annotates. With UM Press Annotates, we are inviting readers to share their digital marginalia to engage in new scholarly conversations.

Our ebook platform Fulcrum uses Hypothesis, a tool for social annotation across the web, to allow readers to write public and private annotations on our more than 250 open-access titles. With our Fund-To-Mission initiative, the number of open-access titles grows each season….”

Recording available – Liquid Margins 27: Opening Books: Social Annotation and OER | Hypothesis

The conversation on Liquid Margins 27: “Opening Books: Social Annotation and OER” will center around open pedagogy and the important relationship between social annotation and open educational resources (OER). Robin DeRosa, Director of the Open Learning & Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth State University, will guest moderate. She’ll be joined by guests Monica Brown, Assistant Program Manager at Rebus; Emily Ragan, Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Metropolitan State University of Denver; and Addie Clark, Associate Professor Natural Science at Oregon Institute of Technology.

What’s That Sound? A Million People Annotating : Hypothesis

“To all the people out there adding your thoughts, questions, memes, and corrections to the margins of digital texts, let’s celebrate our latest milestone together: One million people are annotating with Hypothesis! What does it mean that one million individuals are annotating? More and more people are harnessing the power of social annotation to teach and learn, to publish, to conduct research, to fact check and report news, to keep personal notes, to advance open source technology, and so much more.

And, of course, one million people annotating adds up to a lot of annotations. Just since July, when the community of annotators reached a record 25 million annotations, we’ve climbed to 28 million. With annotations coming so fast, we’re now just celebrating the bigger leaps forward — see you at 50 million?…”

Part 1: Interaction in Context · Promoting and Nurturing Interactions with Open Access Books: Strategies for Publishers and Authors

“Web-based annotations of digital books enrich a scholarly text through overlays and filters that sit on top of the text in order to show additional commentary and feedback. Annotations—in short, a form of readerly or writerly interaction that consists of notes (in any medium) added to texts (of any medium)undefined—already have a long history in a print and manuscript context (e.g., marginalia, errata, rubrics), but the immediacy of two-way discussion between users is a notable feature of digital open annotations, both of comments at the bottom of a text and in-line text annotations. Bertino and Staines therefore liken annotation to a “conversation” between authors and audiences that was previously much less interactive [undefined]. In addition to this, for Tara McPherson annotations (of e.g., digital visual archives) may also facilitate a more “seamless integration of research materials and scholarly analysis” through a closer presentation between commentary and the object studied [undefined]. This is particularly useful in a scholarly communication environment where annotations enable discussions to take place in direct proximity to the material that is under consideration, for example with linguistic markup of text corpora….”

Speculative Annotation Invites Public to Interact with Digitized Collections at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

“Students, educators and learners of all ages are invited to interact with select items in the Library’s collections with the launch of Speculative Annotation, the latest experiment from LC Labs.

Created by artist and 2021 Innovator in Residence Courtney McClellan, Speculative Annotation is an open-source dynamic web application and public art project. The app presents a unique mini collection of free-to-use items from the Library for students, teachers and learners to annotate through captions, drawings and other types of mark-making. As a special feature for Speculative Annotation users, the app includes a collection of informative, engaging annotations from Library experts and resources on the Library’s website….”

A Coalition for Social Learning Across Content : Hypothesis

“Today we’re announcing a coalition, Social Learning Across Content, of educational content creators, technology platforms, service providers, and stakeholder groups that are coming together in support of cross-platform social learning. Moving forward, this coalition will work together to establish user-friendly, interoperable best practices and solutions to bring social learning to all content….

Coalition members will work together to identify the technical challenges standing in the way of interoperability, and to propose and prototype solutions for those challenges. They’ll also work to ensure that solutions are accessible and remain so as different technologies are brought into contact with different contact platforms. A set of technical recommendations that characterize the solution set will be published, including any recommendations for how existing standards like Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) could be extended if need be….”

A Coalition for Social Learning Across Content | Hypothesis

Today we’re announcing a coalition, Social Learning Across Content, of educational content creators, technology platforms, service providers, and stakeholder groups that are coming together in support of cross-platform social learning. Moving forward, this coalition will work together to establish user-friendly, interoperable best practices and solutions to bring social learning to all content.

Crowdsourcing Scholarly Discourse Annotations | 26th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces

Abstract:  The number of scholarly publications grows steadily every year and it becomes harder to find, assess and compare scholarly knowledge effectively. Scholarly knowledge graphs have the potential to address these challenges. However, creating such graphs remains a complex task. We propose a method to crowdsource structured scholarly knowledge from paper authors with a web-based user interface supported by artificial intelligence. The interface enables authors to select key sentences for annotation. It integrates multiple machine learning algorithms to assist authors during the annotation, including class recommendation and key sentence highlighting. We envision that the interface is integrated in paper submission processes for which we define three main task requirements: The task has to be . We evaluated the interface with a user study in which participants were assigned the task to annotate one of their own articles. With the resulting data, we determined whether the participants were successfully able to perform the task. Furthermore, we evaluated the interface’s usability and the participant’s attitude towards the interface with a survey. The results suggest that sentence annotation is a feasible task for researchers and that they do not object to annotate their articles during the submission process.

 

Open Context: Web-based research data publishing

“Open Context reviews, edits, annotates, publishes and archives research data and digital documentation. We publish your data and preserve it with leading digital libraries. We take steps beyond archiving to richly annotate and integrate your analyses, maps and media. This links your data to the wider world and broadens the impact of your ideas….”

ANN: A platform to annotate text with Wikidata IDs | Zenodo

Abstract:  Report of the work done by the Ann team at the eLife Sprint 2020. 

It describes the effort pursued towards a system for universal annotation of biomedical articles using the collaborative knowledge graph of Wikidata.  

The project is currently active at https://github.com/lubianat/ann. 

Community curation in PomBase: enabling fission yeast experts to provide detailed, standardized, sharable annotation from research publications | Database | Oxford Academic

Abstract:  Maximizing the impact and value of scientific research requires efficient knowledge distribution, which increasingly depends on the integration of standardized published data into online databases. To make data integration more comprehensive and efficient for fission yeast research, PomBase has pioneered a community curation effort that engages publication authors directly in FAIR-sharing of data representing detailed biological knowledge from hypothesis-driven experiments. Canto, an intuitive online curation tool that enables biologists to describe their detailed functional data using shared ontologies, forms the core of PomBase’s system. With 8 years’ experience, and as the author response rate reaches 50%, we review community curation progress and the insights we have gained from the project. We highlight incentives and nudges we deploy to maximize participation, and summarize project outcomes, which include increased knowledge integration and dissemination as well as the unanticipated added value arising from co-curation by publication authors and professional curators.