BioMed Central Blog
Join the data debate: draft position statement on open data
BioMed Central supports the goals of the Panton Principles for Open Data in Science but putting them into practice needs to be done in careful consultation with the scientific community to ensure that researchers still receive appropriate credit for their contributions.
Rather than restricting access to data through restrictive licensing terms, cultural norms need to be defined for the assignment of credit, priority with respect to initial publication and the determination of reasonable embargo periods. Fields such as astronomy, economics and genomics have already made significant progress in this direction.
BioMed Central has drafted a position statement on data sharing, open data and licensing, and we invite the wider scientific community to join the discussion to help us define an explicit open data licensing policy going forwards.
The statement discusses what we see as “the Five Ws” for open data, which includes a proposal that, from a specific date, any author submitting to a BioMed Central journal would agree to dedicate the data elements of their article and supplementary material to the public domain and apply an open data conformant licence, such as Creative Commons CC0.
We invite the scientific and publishing community to join us in defining the optimum way to put the Panton Principles into practice. Comment publicly on the draft statement by using the comment function on this blog. Alternatively, contact us to get involved.
BioMed Central will also be discussing these issues as part of the panel discussion on Publishing primary research data at Science Online London on 3rd September 2010.
Posted by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz at 20:03 Comments (3)
sMRI – the most powerful Alzheimer’s disease biomarker?
Apart from the formation of neurofibrillary tangles and deposition of amyloid plaques, other hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) include the loss of both neurones and synapses in the human brain. There is evidence to suggest that this neurodegeneration is closely associated with cognitive decline, which is why structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI), which measures brain morphometry, is considered to be a powerful AD biomarker.
sMRI is a stable biomarker of AD progression and is useful in measuring disease intensity, however the authors stress that we should not rest on our laurels, but continue to build on it, by looking to develop automated techniques of extracting disease-specific information from images and by integrating it with other existing biomarkers for clinical use.
Posted by Alexander Kroll at 12:26 Comments (0)
BMC Research Notes – adding value to your data
Support for scientific data sharing is gathering more and more support in 2010, so rather than “why share data?” the question now is “how?”. Making data available in readily interpretable formats is vital to realising its value in driving new knowledge discovery, and BMC Research Notes today launches a new initiative aimed at promoting best practice in sharing and publishing data, with a focus on standardized, re-useable formats.
Across biology and medicine new data standards are emerging or are already in use, but many may not be enforced by journals or funding agencies, or benefit from established, structured databases for data deposition, such as ArrayExpress for microarray data. Adding value to data has always been at the core of BMC Research Notes’ strategy and the journal aims to produce guidance for authors on domain-specific data standards, to complement our figure preparation guidelines. But as the scientific community itself is best placed to advise on the most appropriate formats for data, the journal has opened this project up to the scientific community and is asking researchers and data managers for their contributions.
Integral to these educational Data Notes will be the inclusion of an example dataset as an additional file, or link to a permanently-available dataset, which can serve as a reference example. Readily re-usable data from a cancer cohort is also published in BMC Research Notes today in the article by Vickers and Cronin, which accompanies the editorial that outlines the goals of this data-driven collection.
Indeed, the future of scholarly communication and research increasingly depends on a commitment to data. Just yesterday in JAMA a commentary on the US Department of Health and Human Services' Open Government strategy discussed the benefits to science – and the economy – of public-use health data sets that maintain privacy. It further called for data to “be released in standardized formats, without intellectual property constraints.”
“Data is the underlying foundation of our science and it is crucial for both replicating results as well as building on them that we work harder at making data more effectively available and useable. It is great to see a pioneer of the Open Access literature like BMC providing leadership on the issue of making data openly available and providing the tools that will enable researchers to improve on current practice,” said Dr Cameron Neylon co-author of the Panton Principles for Open Data in Science.
BioMed Central is waiving the article processing charge for contributions to this special collection of articles, which also extends to contributions on broader aspects of scientific data sharing, archiving, and open data. Contact the BMC Research Notes editorial team for more information or, if you are at tomorrow’s Science Online London, come and talk to us at the session on ‘Publishing primary research data’.
Posted by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz at 11:15 Comments (3)
Journal of Molecular Signaling welcomes new co-Editor-in-Chief
Yung Hou Wong, Head of the Section of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Division of Life Science, at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, has recently joined Journal of Molecular Signaling as co-Editor-in-Chief alongside Danny Dhanasekaran. Professor Wong is a leading expert in the molecular pharmacology of G protein-coupled receptors, signal transduction and integration.
Journal of Molecular Signaling was launched in 2006 and encompasses different molecular aspects of cell signaling underlying normal and pathological conditions. The focus of the journal is on the normal or aberrant molecular mechanisms involving receptors, G-proteins, kinases, phosphatases, and transcription factors in regulating cell proliferation, differentiation, apoptosis, and oncogenesis in mammalian cells. This area also covers the genetic and epigenetic changes that modulate the signaling properties of cells and the resultant physiological conditions. A most highly accessed recent article in the journal determines the molecular effect of sulforaphane (SFN, found in cruciferous vegetables) in growth arrest of pancreatic cancer cells.
We would like to welcome Yung Hou Wong to his new role with this growing journal. He says that “Journal of Molecular Signaling is a significant avenue for researchers in the area of cell signaling to share their discoveries and innovations, and contribute towards the advancement of the field. I am excited to be a part of the team and look forward to working with the editorial board to increase its impact as well as its value to the growing readership across the scientific community and around the world.”
Posted by Helen Whitaker at 11:05 Comments (0)