Monthly Archives: February 2022

Climate change is triggering global humanitarian crises

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Climate scientists from around the world confirm the humanitarian impact of climate change in a report released today by UN climate panel IPCC. Maarten van Aalst, Professor of Climate and Disaster Resilience at the University of Twente and director of the International Red Cross Climate Centre, is one of the lead authors. ‘This report represents a red alert for humanity, an urgent warning of what is heading our way. It confirms what we already see happening, what we expect for the future and – most importantly – what we can do to limit the impact.’

Guest Post: Preprint Feedback is Here – Let’s Make it Constructive and FAST – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“Last year, we convened a Working Group to reflect upon and develop a set of best practices for public preprint feedback. Our rationale was to provide a framework that could benefit and support authors, reviewers, and the community to engage in public and open scientific discussion of preprints, while ensuring a thriving and welcoming environment for everyone. The group worked on a set of “norms” that reflect the behaviors and culture we would like to promote to increase participation and acceptance of preprint public commenting. The result is the FAST principles for preprint feedback, a set of 14 principles clustered around four broad themes:

Focused: assess whether our comments and feedback are targeted towards relevant and actionable parts of the preprint (e.g., the current focus of the paper or the scientific work, rather than suitability for a particular journal).
Appropriate: ensure that before engaging in any kind of scientific discussion, we have reflected on our biases and behave with the same level of integrity as in any other scientific exchange.
Specific: similar to reviewing a manuscript for a journal, preprint feedback should also evaluate the study’s claims against the data and clarify whether the critiques are major or just meant to tackle minor issues that don’t affect the overall findings.
Transparent: as with any type of scientific discussion, it is key to be as open and transparent as possible, embracing any oversights and crediting everyone who participated in the work. However, we acknowledge that not everyone is comfortable signing their comments. In such cases, we provide alternative options for reviewers to disclose their background or expertise to contextualize the comments they post….”

ASAPbio Fellows program 2022

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“The ASAPbio Fellows program aims to allow participants to develop awareness around preprint use, and build confidence in interacting with others about preprints and open research. We also hope that the program allows Fellows to connect with other members of the community. More information on the program is available on our website: asapbio.org/fellows.

We welcome applications from active researchers at any career stage, and from those involved in supporting researchers communicate their work e.g. librarians, editors or science communicators. There are no restrictions related to country/location.

The Fellows program will run for 8 months and the expectation is that you will participate in monthly activities requiring up to 5 hours/month. ASAPbio will provide support throughout the program. ASAPbio Fellows are also members of the ASAPbio Community.

We will review applications and follow up with selected participants via email within two weeks after the March 25 application deadline. The program will run from April to November 2022.

Please complete the form below to tell us a bit about you and your interest in the program. Please note: a copy of your answers to this form will be emailed to you. By clicking submit, you consent to ASAPbio sharing the information as detailed in the question descriptions. We will list information of the selected program participants on the ASAPbio website, this includes name, position, institution, research area and social media information. We use your email address to invite you to the Google and Slack groups and to contact you directly. We will not share your email with any third parties without permission….”

Connecticut Introduces Library E-book Bill

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“Connecticut has become the latest state to introduce a library e-book bill, introducing bill 131 in its February session.

The Connecticut bill is similar to efforts in other states now underway, in that it would require publishers who offer an e-book to consumers in the state to also offer to license the works to libraries on reasonable terms. One notable difference, however, is that the Connecticut bill offers a broad definition of what is meant by “reasonable” terms….”

Policy into Action: the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science under the spotlight – actions for publishing

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“OASPA is pleased to announce our next webinar which will focus on the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379949.locale=en) and the practical actions open access editors and publishers take to implement them. Practical guidelines for open access publishers will be discussed and co-developed together during and after the webinar.

We welcome our speakers:
Ana Persic who will present the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science and its connections to scholarly publishing,
Roheena Anand from PLOS,
Krzysztof Siewicz from the Polish Library of Science and;
Raoul Kamadjeu from the Pan African Medical Journal, who will share their approaches to implementing the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science.

The panellists will each speak for 12 minutes, and then we will open it up to questions from the audience and discussion on the practical steps that publishers take. The webinar will be chaired by Iryna Kuchma, EIFL….”

Knowledge Unlatched Presents Open Access Heroes 2022

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Knowledge Unlatched (KU), the international initiative for Open Access (OA), is pleased to announce OA Heroes 2022, highlighting the countries, institutions, publishers, disciplines and scholarly titles seeing the most usage worldwide. The number of total user interactions (including downloads and views) for KU titles has grown year on year by 16 percent and now stands at a total of 16.2 million. On average, each title unlatched through KU gets 5,450 user interactions.

Updating the UCI IPAT Fair Use Jurisprudence Project for Fair Use Week 2022

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“Last year, in celebration of Fair Use Week, the IPAT clinic took a deep dive into fair use. We looked at every written judicial opinion that discussed fair use from the beginning of 2019 through February 2021, and made them available in a searchable, sortable database with abstracts and commentary and links to copies of every single case. We learned a lot, and the resources we made available were used by many scholars, students, and attorneys across the country….

For Fair Use Week 2022, we’ve returned to the Fair Use Jurisprudence Project to analyze and present another year’s worth of fair use cases. Our first observation is that the rate of fair use activity has continued to increase. We logged 64 opinions discussing fair use in 2021, increasing from 45 in 2020 and 22 in 2019. Go here for the abstracts.  Photographs continue to be the most common type of work at issue in these disputes, with 67 of the 132 total cases from 2019 to 2022 relating to their use. Of course, not all photograph cases come out the same way. Online news sites, web storefronts, bloggers and artists have all claimed fair use as a defense against photograph infringement claims, with varying results….”

 

Writing up your clinical trial report for a scientific journal: the REPORT trial guide for effective and transparent research reporting without spin | British Journal of Sports Medicine

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Abstract:  The REPORT guide is a ‘How to’ guide to help you report your clinical research in an effective and transparent way. It is intended to supplement established first choice reporting tools, such as Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT), by adding tacit knowledge (ie, learnt, informal or implicit knowledge) about reporting topics that we have struggled with as authors or see others struggle with as journal reviewers or editors. We focus on the randomised controlled trial, but the guide also applies to other study designs. Topics included in the REPORT guide cover reporting checklists, trial report structure, choice of title, writing style, trial registry and reporting consistency, spin or reporting bias, transparent data presentation (figures), open access considerations, data sharing and more.

An Open Access Resource for Functional Brain Connectivity from Fully Awake Marmosets: Open Access Marmoset Functional Connectivity Resource – ScienceDirect

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Abstract:  The common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) is quickly gaining traction as a premier neuroscientific model. However, considerable progress is still needed in understanding the functional and structural organization of the marmoset brain to rival that documented in long-standing preclinical model species, like mice, rats, and Old World primates. To accelerate such progress, we present the Marmoset Functional Connectivity Resource (marmosetbrainconnectome.org), consisting of over 70 hours of resting-state fMRI (RS-fMRI) data acquired at 500 µm isotropic resolution from 31 fully awake marmosets in a common stereotactic space. Three-dimensional functional connectivity (FC) maps for every cortical and subcortical gray matter voxel are stored online. Users can instantaneously view, manipulate, and download any whole-brain functional connectivity (FC) topology (at the subject- or group-level) along with the raw datasets and preprocessing code. Importantly, researchers can use this resource to test hypotheses about FC directly – with no additional analyses required – yielding whole-brain correlations for any gray matter voxel on demand. We demonstrate the resource’s utility for presurgical planning and comparison with tracer-based structural connectivity as proof of concept. Complementing existing structural connectivity resources for the marmoset brain, the Marmoset Functional Connectivity Resource affords users the distinct advantage of exploring the connectivity of any voxel in the marmoset brain, not limited to injection sites nor constrained by regional atlases. With the entire raw database (RS-fMRI and structural images) and preprocessing code openly available for download and use, we expect this resource to be broadly valuable to test novel hypotheses about the functional organization of the marmoset brain.

 

Developing culturally appropriate food literacy resources for Aboriginal children with Foodbank WA’s Superhero Foods® – Tartaglia – – Health Promotion Journal of Australia – Wiley Online Library

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On an Australian program to develop OER on aboriginal foods. 

“Key enablers to the success of the resource included: free online access, the highly engaging nature of the resources and adaptability to be implemented across a number of Aboriginal language groups in WA. Ensuring visual representation of healthy choices was fundamental to reinforcing nutrition messaging. Superhero Foods resources are a positive and important inclusion in the health promotion toolbox for Aboriginal children.”

We’ve Added 2,000 More Ebooks Thanks to a New Open Access Project : JMU Libraries

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“Explore over 2,000 ebooks from MIT Press: We are pleased to announce that the JMU community now has access to over 2,000 ebooks from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MIT Press—and has helped facilitate opening the Spring 2022 title list to be open access! These ebooks are from across the arts, social sciences, humanities and sciences. They range from recent scholarly books to classic academic works.

You can find these ebooks in JMU’s Library Search by adding the phrase “MIT Press” to your search terms.

The project is a worldwide collaboration for open access led by MIT: To bring this incredible collection of ebooks to you, JMU Libraries joined with over 160 libraries worldwide to support an innovative, sustainable framework for open access books from MIT Press. This Direct to Open (D2O) project facilitates a collaborative, library-supported, and open access approach to publishing professional and scholarly books….”

Open Science Training Handbook

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A group of fourteen authors came together in February 2018 at the TIB (German National Library of Science and Technology) in Hannover to create an open, living handbook on Open Science training. High-quality trainings are fundamental when aiming at a cultural change towards the implementation of Open Science principles. Teaching resources provide great support for Open Science instructors and trainers. The Open Science training handbook will be a key resource and a first step towards developing Open Access and Open Science curricula and andragogies. Supporting and connecting an emerging Open Science community that wishes to pass on their knowledge as multipliers, the handbook will enrich training activities and unlock the community’s full potential.

Sharing their experience and skills of imparting Open Science principles, the authors (see below) produced an open knowledge and educational resource oriented to practical teaching. The focus of the new handbook is not spreading the ideas of Open Science, but showing how to spread these ideas most effectively. The form of a book sprint as a collaborative writing process maximised creativity and innovation, and ensured the production of a valuable resource in just a few days….”