BioMed Central Blog
Open Knowledge Foundation launch Panton Fellowships
Guest blog post from Laura Newman, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation
The Open Knowledge Foundation is delighted to announce the launch of the Panton Fellowships. Funded by Open Society Foundations, Panton Fellowships will be awarded to scientists who actively promote open data in science.
• Visit the Panton Fellowships home page for more information, including details of how to apply.
We firmly believe that “open data means better science”. In 2009, the Panton Principles were formulated in order to encourage and assist scientists in placing scientific data in the public domain. Now in 2012, the Panton Fellowships represent a major step forward towards this goal.
Thanks to the support of Open Society Foundations, the Open Knowledge Foundation are able to offer two Panton Fellowships in 2012. The nature of the Fellowships make them ideally suited towards graduate students and early-stage career scientists, although anyone with an active interest in open science is encouraged to apply.
Fellowships will be held for one year, and will have a value of £8k p.a. Fellows will have the freedom to undertake a range of activities, which could include e.g. exploring practical solutions for making data open, facilitating discussions about openness, and catalysing the scientific community. Fellows will continue to be employed and/or study at their current institution throughout the Fellowship, and activities undertaken for the Panton Fellowship should ideally complement and enhance their existing endeavours. Applicants are strongly encouraged to propose their own work plan.
Dr Cameron Neylon, of the Panton Fellowships Advisory Board, commented on the ‘real potential’ of the Fellowships to influence practice surrounding open data in the scientific community. ‘Panton Fellowships will allow those who are still deeply involved in research to think closely about the policy and technical issues surrounding open data’, observed Dr Neylon. By allowing scientists the scope both to explore the ‘big picture’ – gathering evidence to promote discussion throughout the community – and also to work on specific technical solutions to individual problems, the Panton Fellowship scheme has the potential to make a real impact upon the practice of open data in science.
Posted by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz at 19:24 Comments (0)
Cancer is the leading cause of death in the world and s second most prolific cause of death in developing countries. GLOBOCAN estimates that around 12.7 million cancer cases and 7.6 million cancer deaths occurred in 2008 and these numbers are expected to increase as a result of an ageing, and growing, population as well as an increase in cancer-associated lifestyle choices such as smoking, physical inactivity, and westernised diets. Of these deaths attributed to cancer, 30-40% are thought to be preventable, through the adoption of healthier lifestyles and immunizations, and around one third of cases can be cured through early diagnosis and treatment strategies.
It is with the prevention of cancer in mind that World Cancer Day 2012 takes place, this year on 4 February. Falling almost six months after the first UN High-level Meeting on Non Communicable diseases (NCDs), and the signing of a political declaration supporting prevention and control of these conditions, this year’s World Cancer Day aims to encourage everyone to do their part in reducing premature deaths from cancer and other NCDs by 25% by 2025.
To find out more on the latest in cancer research visit our Cancer gateway or read our most recent articles on cancer prevention.
Posted by Philip Dooner at 17:02 Comments (0)
OSTP publishes public comments in response to RFIs on public access to publications and data
The US Office of Science and Technology Policy has published the comments received as part of the latest phase of its public consultations on Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research and Public Access to Digital Data Resulting From Federally Funded Scientific Research.
BioMed Central responded to both Requests for Information, and our contributions are now publicly available online:
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 12:24 Comments (0)
Connecting the evidence: an “ontology” for Threaded Publications
Unpublished research is a serious problem for evidence-based decision making in healthcare, and this was recently highlighted on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and in an entire issue of the BMJ. Systematic reviews aim to present the totality of the evidence, and a problem for those preparing and maintaining these reviews is how to find unpublished studies and data. But, even when clinical trials are reported in journals and their supplements the formats and descriptions are widely heterogeneous and studies can remain difficult to discover and challenging to compare with similar trials.
Clearly connecting trial-related publications is a way to help with this problem and is a major goal of BioMed Central’s Threaded Publications initiative. To achieve its fundamental aims of connecting all digital published content relating to the evidence about a particular trial, however, Threaded Publications must go beyond a single journal or publisher. Through our partnership with CrossRef – an organisation founded by publishers, for publishers – and engagement with editors and publishers we hope to achieve interoperability across different publishing platforms. The desired outcome is that articles reporting the protocol or the findings of a trial published in different journals or by different publishers will be linked in a thread, which should also include the trial’s entry in a research register.
The Threaded Publications concept and prototype, which was demonstrated at a number of medical communications and publishing meetings in 2011, builds on CrossRef’s widely-established digital object identifier (DOI) infrastructure and more recently-developed CrossMark tool. CrossMark, which has recently been implemented by the Royal Society, conveys additional information, such as corrections and updates, about journal articles in a standard way. This ‘non-bibliographic article-level metadata’, to use its more technical term, can be displayed for any article which uses CrossMark – including, in principle, the publication thread – by a reader clicking on the CrossMark logo (see figure; but noting that the terms used in the sample thread need further work).
With cross-publisher interoperability comes a need for standardization and, specifically, a simple “ontology” (a controlled vocabulary – a bit like a dictionary – of agreed terms on a specific topic) of different article types that might be included in a thread of publications. This may sound complicated or difficult to implement but, if we know what each element of the thread is, and where it sits in the thread, we stand a good chance of making that information usefully available to a reader, patient, practitioner, or researcher, including those preparing systematic reviews. Agreeing on the terminology for describing the literature will help achieve this.
Any journal or publisher participating in the Threaded Publications scheme will need to agree to and use these standard terms – whether they publish the study protocol, results, methodology, an editorial discussing the trial, the dataset, or something else. Trial registration records, such as those in the ISRCTN register, are central to transparent reporting but these are not currently citable and discoverable in the same way as journal articles. A logical development to help implement Threaded Publications would be assign DOIs to trial registration records. This would better enable citation – and possibly academic credit – of these records in the same fashion as journal articles might potentially provide more motivation to ensure the completeness of the registry entries.
The team at BioMed Central, working closely with our external and recently expanded advisory group (see Acknowledgements below), have drafted a concept document, for standard terms describing publications that might be related to a clinical trial.
Professor Mike Clarke, Director of the All-Ireland Hub for Trials Methodology Research put the current complexity of the literature into context: “A research study is so much more than the few thousand words that make it into a journal article describing its findings and, yet, this is all that is readily available for most studies. By providing the means to thread together a published ‘life story’ for a study, BioMed Central are helping to release its full potential to influence practice and future research. Users will be able to enter the thread at any point and travel in either direction to find out more about the design, conduct and outcome of the study.”
To be part of a threaded publication a document must be one that is explicitly relevant to the published evidence associated with a particular trial. This sets this functionality apart from currently available features that link to [possibly] ‘related articles’. We believe we have captured all the types of article or record that currently exist in the literature and scientific databases, but we may have missed, or have named some inappropriately. We invite the clinical research and publishing communities to download the document and share your comments on our first step towards an ontology of publications related to clinical trials.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Prof Doug Altman, Sir Iain Chalmers, Prof Mike Clarke and Dr Ben Goldacre for their comments on an earlier draft of the ontology, and this blog.
Footnote: The ontology concept document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
Posted by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz at 18:36 Comments (0)
Renal and bladder cancer: current trends and controversies
Urology and oncology specialists came together in London on the 26th–27th January to discuss new developments and controversial topics at the 3rd National Renal and Bladder Cancer conference. Around 80 specialists attended each day including surgeons, oncologists, radiologists and scientists.
An important theme linking many speakers’ presentations across both days was personalized cancer treatment, and how knowing more about patients’ individual genetic information will lead to tailored treatment and improved patient care. Mr Tim O’Brien from Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust opened discussions with an interesting presentation about how patient care is currently managed for renal cancer, and how we should move towards personalized medicine in the future. Dr Athena Matakidou from the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute continued with this theme by describing recent efforts to sequence the genes involved in renal cancer. In addition, Dr Nav Vasudev discussed CAGEKID, an internationally collaborative project aimed at clinically characterizing the genetic changes that occur in patients with renal cancer, which should lead to more individualized treatment in the future.
Prof Margaret Knowles kicked off the sessions on the second day with a discussion of the genetic biomarkers for bladder cancer and how they could be applied to predict patients’ responses to different treatments. Dr Tom Powles summarized recent and ongoing clinical trials for bladder cancer, highlighting the unique LaMB trial, which is the first to take into account patients’ genetic information for bladder cancer treatment.
A controversial topic in bladder cancer treatment is whether surgery or radiotherapy should be used as first-line therapy; Prof Nick James outlined the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, and discussed the importance of selecting patients who are likely to respond well to radiotherapy. An interesting debate involving many specialists followed, with some preferring surgery and others believing that radiotherapy should be given in the first instance. Mr Shamin Khan described a recent advance in surgery for bladder cancer, robotic cystectomy, which helps to reduce patient recovery time after the operation and could soon be used in hospitals across the country.
The conference highlighted how recent progress in identifying genes associated with both renal and bladder cancer will be translated into personalized treatment in the future. We should look out for exciting developments in validating genetic and protein biomarkers in the clinic, and eagerly await the results of the landmark LaMB trial.
Posted by Claire Tree-Booker at 10:32 Comments (0)
GigaScience part of global data-sharing effort: new standards allow disparate data sets to integrate
Guest blog post by the editors of GigaScience, which is now accepting submissions. This post has also been published on the GigaScience journal blog. Follow @GigaScience on Twitter.
Lead by researchers at the University of Oxford, a group of more than 30 scientific organizations around the globe, have worked to produce a common standard that will make possible the consistent description of enormous and radically different databases compiled in fields ranging from genetics to stem cell science, to environmental studies. One of the contributors playing a role in the project is GigaScience, as we feel it potentially very useful to aid in the handling of the wide-variety of data-types covered by our scope.
The new standard provides a way for scientists in widely disparate fields to co-ordinate each other’s findings by allowing behind-the-scenes combination of the mountains of data produced by modern, technology driven science.
This standard-compliant data sharing effort and the establishment of its online presence, the ISA Commons – www.isacommons.org, is described in a Commentary (and highlighted in the Editorial) published on 27th January 2012 in the journal Nature Genetics.
“We are now working together to provide the means to manage enormous quantities of otherwise incompatible data, ranging from the biomedical to the environmental,” says Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Team Leader of the project at the Oxford e-Research Centre, and founder of the BioSharing Network (of which BMC and GigaScience are both members).
”An example of how this works at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute is that we can now find a relationship between experiments involving normal blood stem cells in fish and cancers in children”, says Winston Hide, Professor of Bioinformatics at the Harvard School of Public Health (for more see this related publication).
It was necessary to establish common data standards, say the Commentary’s authors, because of the tsunami of dataandtechnologies washing over the sciences. “There are hundreds of new technologies coming along but also many ways to describe the information produced” said Sansone, noting that "we can take a jigsaw puzzle of different sciences and now fit the many pieces together to form a complete picture".
"One of the things that I find most empowering about this effort is that now small research groups can begin to store laboratory data using this framework, complying to community standards, without their own dedicated bioinformatic support. It is a bit like facebook allowing everyone to create their own website pages - suddenly you don't need to be an expert in computing to get your data out to the rest of the world", says Dr Jules Griffin, of the University of Cambridge.
"What we like about it is its unifying nature across different bioscience fields and institutions”, says Dr Christoph Steinbeck, The European Bioinformatics Institute.
And "it also has the potential to work for large centers too”, says Scott Edmunds, of the BGI and GigaScience. As GigaScience aims to take as many types of “large-data” as possible, the need to handle as many formats as possible was essential, and the large number of data-types supported by ISA-commons and ability to create new configurations potentially addresses this very important issue. This has lead to GigaScience being the first journal to offer authors the option to submit data in ISA-commons format, and these resources have also been made available to the BGI (the world's largest Genomics institute) to release their enormous quantities of data quicker the wider research community through the associated GigaDB database.
For more on the aims and goals of GigaScience, please see this previous BMC Blog posting, and for news and updates follow GigaBlog and the @GigaScience twitter feed. The journal is now taking submissions for “big-data” associated research, tools and software for handling large-scale data, and reviews and commentary on issues dealing with data-handling and standards.
References:
1. ISA Commons: isacommons.org
2. It's not about the data. Nature Genetics 44, 2 (2012).
3. Sansone, S-A. et al. Toward interoperable bioscience data. Nature Genetics 44, 2 (2012).
4. Ho Sui SJ et al. The Stem Cell Discovery Engine: an integrated repository and analysis system for cancer stem cell comparisons. Nucleic Acids Res. 1;40(D1):D984-D991. (2012).
Laurie Goodman, Editor-in-Chief
Scott Edmunds, Editor
Alexandra Basford, Assistant Edit
Posted by Gabriella Anderson at 17:08 Comments (0)
From Baconian to Popperian Neuroscience
In the first in a series of opinion pieces for Neural Systems & Circuits, David Gamez argues for a greater use of mathematical modelling in order to study the brain (From Baconian to Popperian Neuroscience). The piece likens the recent technological advances in neuroscience with the development of physics in the 17th century, and suggests that the same principles (e.g. the systematic gathering of experimental data in order to elucidate the scientific truth) should hold true in this evolving field.
David states “This opinion piece argues that the gathering of facts about the brain needs to be complemented by a greater focus on mathematical models whose predictions can be experimentally tested. These models should not be fitted to a particular set of brain measurements, but based on general laws that could in principle be applied to any intelligent creature.”
This piece marks the first of our Opinionated Neuroscientists series, in which we invited contributions from early career neuroscientists on a wide variety of subjects within the field. For more information on this series, please read the Editorial Wanted: opinionated neuroscientists, or submit your opinion piece via our online system.
Posted by Anna Webb at 09:17 Comments (0)
From the Rhine to the Rift Valley: Human population genetics in Genome Biology
Has hypoxia adaptation in the Ethiopian highlands mirrored that seen in Tibet and the Andes? Is there a genetic definition for an Ashkenazi Jew? These are two questions on human diversity that can now be answered, thanks to new research articles published in this month's Genome Biology.
In the first article, the University of Pennsylvania's Tishkoff lab, in collaboration with Addis Ababa University, sought to identify genetic adaptations to high altitude present in the Amhara people of the Ethiopian Highlands. Two other high altitude populations – in Tibet and the Andes – have previously been studied in this way; obtaining Ethiopian samples, however, proved to be a challenging feat.
A set of strong candidate genes for high altitude selection were identified in the Amhara, whose samples were used both for genotyping and for physiological measurements. As with Tibetan and Andean populations, adaptations targeted the HIF-1 pathway, demonstrating the selective pressure brought about by the risk of hypoxia in high altitude environments. While the three populations share an adaptive pathway in common, the individual genetic changes underlying the hypoxia-resistant phenotype were different in the Ethiopian cohort to that seen in Tibetans or Andeans. This example of convergent evolution suggests that the HIF-1 pathway is an inevitable adaptation for any population under selection pressure for hypoxia.
The definition of what constitutes a Jew is an age-old question without a simple answer. The Ashkenazim are a subpopulation of the Jewish people descended from a small founder population based in Western Europe approximately 1,000 years ago; using the largest Ashkenazi genotyping cohort to date, Todd Lencz (The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research) and colleagues were able to determine a distinct genetic signature that can identify Ashkenazi Jews.
Consistent with previous reports, the article concludes that the founding Ashkenazi population likely included both Levantine Jewish and European Caucasian individuals. However, the results presented by Lencz and colleagues powerfully show that, since the founding event, the level of admixture with "host" European populations (and with other Jewish populations) has been extremely low.
The genetic signature also harbors an enrichment of genes associated with disease pathways known to be overrepresented in the Ashkenazi population, and so will therefore help to unravel the genetic basis by which these conditions (including cystic fibrosis and Usher syndrome) have become prevalent among Ashkenazim.
Posted by Naomi Attar at 13:35 Comments (0)
European Journal of Medical Research has now fully launched
Yesterday, European Journal of Medical Research published
its first open access articles with BioMed Central having transferred from I.
Holzapfel Verlag, where it began as a subscription journal in 1995. Edited
by Professor Deiter Häussinger of Düsseldorf University, European Journal of Medical Research publishes articles of international interest from all areas
of medical research, with a strong focus on clinical research. The journal has an Impact Factor
of 1.09
Amongst the first open access articles to be published in the journal is a study from Fircke et al. investigating differences in periodontal damage in HIV patients receiving antiretroviral treatment compared to untreated patients. For further information about the journal, please see Professor Häussinger’s editorial or visit the “About” page.
In conjunction with the transfer of European Journal of Medical Research to BioMed Central, the past three years of archival content will be available online as open access articles soon after launch.
Posted by Georgina Giddens at 13:32 Comments (0)
Invitation to submit to Cancer Bioinformatics thematic series
“Cancer Bioinformatics: Bioinformatic Methods, Network Biomarkers and Precision Medicine” is a special thematic series to be published across BMC Bioinformatics, BMC Cancer, Genome Medicine and Journal of Clinical Bioinformatics (JCBi).
Cancer remains one of the leading causes of death across the globe. Most cancer treatments work for only a subset of patients and there is still a great need for disease-specific biomarkers and individualized medicine, since a large proportion of patients receive ineffective treatments. It is essential that we develop accurate tools for delivering the right treatment to the right patient in the right time, based on biological characterization of each patient’s tumor. There is still a lack of tools for aiding early diagnosis, prognosis prediction, or predicting response to treatment. Increasing evidence that genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic analyses can be utilized to understand molecular mechanisms of cancer has led to increasing work within this area.
This series will specifically focus on new developments in cancer bioinformatics and computational systems biology and will present biologically interesting discoveries on cancer using computational methods, in addition to exploring the potential of clinical applications to improve the outcomes of patients with cancer.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- Algorithms for clinical biomarker selection
- Integrative approaches
- Systems biology and network-based approaches
- Novel approaches to clinical trials
- Deep sequencing and proteomic profiling
- Epigenetic mechanisms and RNAs
- Drug discovery and development
- Individualized medicine
Submission of original research, methodology, software, and database articles are encouraged until 1st November 2012 but will be processed as soon as they come in.
Please direct any questions to Xiangdong Wang (Series Editor) at editorial@jclinbioinformatics.com. Please submit your manuscript here: BMC Bioinformatics, BMC Cancer, Genome Medicine and Journal of Clinical Bioinformatics, and state clearly in the covering letter that it is intended for this thematic series.
Posted by Helen Whitaker at 17:12 Comments (0)
Genome Biology’s two-mile high epigenomic epiphanies
"A Lamarckian contribution to natural selection doesn't make much sense to me," says father-of-(modern) epigenetics Andy Feinberg as he opens his talk at the Keystone Symposium on Epigenomics.
Admittedly, expressing skepticism toward Lamarck’s theory on the heritability of acquired traits is hardly controversial in the 21st century, but a number of better accepted theories were also challenged during the meeting, which was held concurrently with the Keystone Symposium on Chromatin Dynamics January 17-22 in Keystone, CO.
Tim Bestor (Columbia) came fully armed and ready for a fight as he took on the prevailing truth in the literature that promoter CpG hypermethylation is a pathogenic feature of many tumors. But, strikingly, the audience response was one of agreement with Bestor's line of argument. An overreliance on tissue culture cell lines was blamed for the unrepresentative reporting of tumor cell methylation patterns.
The importance of avoiding generalizations from results observed in a given cellular context was a strong message from the meeting, and multiple presentations reported remarkably high cell-type specificity for a range of epigenomic features.
Another theory to find itself in the crosshairs was that of an independent functional significance for histone modifications; instead, it was argued that the distribution of these marks is merely reflective of polymerase activity and of chromatin openness.
The conference organizers believe that the turnout (~650 participants) is a world record for an epigenomics meeting, a clear sign that the field is in its ascendancy. Methodological innovations – such as the Dekker lab's HiC approach to mapping the genome in 3D, Paul Soloway's high-throughput fluorescent chromatin sorting, and high resolution DNA-protein interaction mapping methods developed by the Henikoff and Pugh* labs – show that there is plenty of potential for epigenomics to continue its upward momentum. Perfect timing, then, for this year's Genome Biology special issue focusing on epigenomics, for which we are now accepting submissions. BioMed Central is also the publisher of Epigenetics & Chromatin, an open access journal dedicated to this topic, which boasts Steve Henikoff and Frank Grosveld as hands-on Editors-in-Chief.
A final thought: maybe it was just the thin mountain air befuddling the mind, but some of the work presented on heritable epialleles and mobile sRNAs in plants did seem, after all, to offer renewed hope for a quasi-Lamarckian inheritance (propagation of an acquired trait for a few generations, if not in permanency).
*see our Research Highlight by Eric Mendenhall and Brad Bernstein on the Pugh lab's ChIP-exo method
See also: Genome Biology's Twitter stream for a more detailed account of the Symposia
Posted by Naomi Attar at 16:59 Comments (0)
Israel Journal of Health Policy Research – Promoting international interactions
Israel Journal of Health Policy Research, the official journal of The Israel National Institute for Health Policy and Health Services Research, launches today with BioMed Central, under the expert leadership of Editors-in-Chief Avi Israeli and Bruce Rosen.
"Israel Journal of Health Policy Research (IJHPR) seeks to promote intensive intellectual interactions among scholars and practitioners from Israel and other countries regarding all aspects of health policy, with particular attention to Israel", say the co-Editors-in-Chief in their inaugural editorial. The journal welcomes submissions from any country that are relevant to health-services and public-health policy, and have implications for health and healthcare policy in Israel. The journal aims to "foster wider communication between health scientists and policy analysts in Israel and their colleagues around the world".
Each article that focuses on Israeli healthcare is accompanied by a brief commentary by a leading non-Israeli scholar who explores the international implications of the reported research. For example, Mark Chassin provides an international perspective in his commentary 'Quality of Care: How Good is Good Enough?', which accompanies Dena Jaffe and colleagues research on the quality of community healthcare in Israel.
For further information about the journal’s scope, please visit the journal website, and to receive regular updates of the journal content sign up for article alerts.
Posted by Liz Hoffman at 14:24 Comments (0)
Aquatic Biosystems: Riding the wave
Aquatic Biosystems, previously Saline Systems, was relaunched today with a broader scope to incorporate all aspects of basic and 
applied research on aquatic organisms and environments.
The first articles published today in Aquatic Biosystems include research by Patricia Assuncao et al. on the molecular taxonomy of new strains of Dunaliella, and research by Steve Ferguson and colleagues on predation behaviour and feeding ecology of killer whales in the Canadian Arctic based on traditional Inuit ecological knowledge and scientific observations.
The new journal also has an expanded Editorial Board, who cover new subject areas including fisheries, microbial ecology, population genetics, and aquatic invertebrate ecology. The journal is ideally placed to benefit from the increasing focus on aquatic biological systems within the scientific community and will be key in disseminating the important research results and information published within this field.
Also published in the journal today is an introductory editorial from Editors-in-Chief Shiladitya DasSarma and Edward Phlips, who discuss the changes in aquatic biological systems through time and the timeliness of Aquatic Biosystems’ relaunch.
“The increasing and widening threats posed by the actions of human biosystems to the integrity and sustainability of aquatic biosystems highlight the importance of understanding how these systems function, and their resilience to environmental change. Understanding the aquatic microbial community and its effects on plants and animals is key to choosing a sustainable future. The complexity of this task will require the use of all available resources, including the wide range of technological capabilities driving basic and applied research in the 21st century.”
We look forward to highlighting other leading articles on aquatic biosystems in the future and to you helping us grow and cement the journals’ reputation in the field as the home for all research on aquatic organisms and environments.
Posted by Genevieve Horne at 14:18 Comments (0)
Globalization and Health set to move onwards and upwards in 2012
With the publication of three Thematic Series and with submissions to the journal up by more than a third compared to 2010, 2011 proved to be a great year for Globalization and Health. The journal is set to continue to move with momentum in 2012, with the recent news that it will receive its first official Impact Factor in the summer. The journal currently has an unofficial impact factor of 2.07.
Globalization and Health, which is affiliated with the London School of Economics, publishes high quality research on globalization and its effects on health, on such diverse topics as the politics of the tobacco industry and access to essential medicines. This year, co-Editors-in-Chief Emma Pitchforth and Greg Martin are looking forward to publication of a new Thematic Series entitled: ‘Climate Change and Global Health: Implications for Human Health and Health Systems’. This highly topical series aims to explore the resilience and flexibility of our health systems in the face of possible large-scale disasters linked to climate change.
Globalization and Health welcomes a range of publications, including original research, commentaries, evidence reviews, debate articles and book reviews. To submit your manuscript to Globalization and Health, please click here.
Posted by Ian Ward at 10:53 Comments (0)
A new tool in the fight against healthcare-associated infection
Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control (ARIC) has launched with BioMed Central today.
Led by Andreas Voss, ARIC is a global forum for the scientific community working on the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of healthcare-associated infections.
Healthcare-associated infections are on the rise because of changes in healthcare systems and the spread of antimicrobial-resistant strains of both new and well-known pathogens. With increasing numbers of people travelling nationally and internationally, borders to transmission of infections no longer exist and fighting healthcare-associated infections has truly become a global challenge.
Therefore, it is important to share knowledge in this field on a global scale. This was highlighted at the 1st International Conference on Prevention and Infection Control and consequently ARIC was born.
With the support of an internationally recognized Editorial Board, ARIC aims to become the leading resource for the dissemination of scientific knowledge on all aspects of healthcare-associated infections. Please visit the journal website to learn more about the ARIC and to submit your research.
Posted by Srimathy Sriskantharajah at 17:15 Comments (0)