scientific research

Dr Richard Bowman from the Department of Physics, working with collaborators at the University of Cambridge and Tanzanian “digital blacksmiths” STICLab, wants to create much cheaper, open-source devices such as microscopes which can be used for disease diagnosis and scientific research. The three-year project, funded through the Global Challenges Research Fund, is testing and refining a prototype general purpose optical microscope made from mass produced lenses, a Raspberry Pi mini-computer and a 3D-printed plastic frame...

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BioMed Central (BMC), one of the leading open access (OA) and STM publishers, announced in mid-September that Matthew Cockerill, managing director, would be leaving the company at the end of the year. BMC was founded in 2000 and was acquired by Springer Science+Business Media in 2008. Last month, I had a chance to sit down with Cockerill to talk about some of his experiences with OA and STM publishing. Read More »

ACS Publications, a leading scientific journal publisher and a Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS), announced today a far-reaching expansion of its open access publishing options –– including a major new open access journal, more licensing choices for authors and a stimulus program to support authors who select ACS journals when seeking to publish their work open access. Read More »

The names of the six finalists for the ASAP awards are now out, and I was pleased to see Daniel Mietchen’s name in the list. Daniel Mietchen, Raphael Wimmer and Nils Dagsson Moskopp have been working on a really valuable project. There was an opportunity in exploiting open access literature to illustrate articles in Wikipedia. Read More »

Startup ResearchGate, a social network for scientists, has raised $35 million in Series C financing led by Bill Gates and Tenaya Capital for its goal of making scientific research more transparent. Read More »

An open-access platform to enable the integration of European and Brazilian biodiversity research tools has been developed through an EU-funded programme. The EUBRAZILOPENBIO [...] project, which was completed earlier this year, will help promote cross-border innovation and the sharing of best practice in a vitally important field of research. Read More »

The US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), part of the Executive Office of the President, has issued a sweeping policy memo entitled, “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research.” It directs all federal research agencies to develop and implement open access (OA) plans over the next 2-3 years. Read More »