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ConTech Pharma 2022 takes place in just 2 weeks

ConTech Pharma on 1st and 2nd March features a phenomenal speaker line up including Roche, SciBite, Protocols.io, Molecular Connections, Springer Nature and the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre will discuss FAIR data.

  • What has been done to date that illustrates the benefits of FAIR data implementation to enable Digital Transformation?
  • What challenges need to be overcome to effectively leverage FAIR data implementation for Digital Transformation and how can this be achieved? 
  • FAIR data management can be seen as one enabler of digital transformation. What are the major areas of practical challenge for data management and governance to enable digital transformation? Are they likely to include 1) implementation of a smart mix of technologies, procedures, and policies 2) training and mindset shift for smart people and 3) culture change (often major) for big organisations? What other challenges are important to tackle? For example, reducing the complexity of the landscape for the numerous players in the supply chain ecosystem?
  • How can both new and existing community-wide initiatives involving publishers, technology vendors, and industry continue to influence and drive change to better enable Digital Transformation?

If you are a publisher, content strategist or curator, R & D scientist, pharma or digital healthcare professional and this resonates it’s time to register for this event. Senior executives from across Pharma and Publishing already registered – join them at ConTech Pharma and take the plunge, register here: https://www.contech-event.com/ConTechPharma2022  

PLOS Water publishes first papers

The Public Library of Science (PLOS) today announced that PLOS Water has published its initial cohort of papers. The journal’s mission is to connect researchers across the hydrology, water resources, and water, sanitation and hygiene communities, amplifying a diverse set of voices to influence the global discourse around water. The journal has so far received more than 60 submissions from researchers around the world.

“This is a vitally important area of research. While the amount of water on earth is essentially fixed, demand for water continues to rise with population growth and increasing living standards,” said Jenna Davis, Co-Editor-in-Chief, PLOS Water. “It has never been more important to connect scholars and practitioners working to close the gap in access to water and sanitation services with those focused on managing freshwater resources in a changing climate.”

“We are confident that our broad scope will integrate water sciences and water practices, bringing together in one place research of the highest methodological and ethical standards, from all continents and global regions,” said Pierre Horwitz, Co-Editor-in-Chief, PLOS Water.

PLOS announced the launch of five new journals last year and PLOS Water now joins these journals with papers ready for publication. The journal is underpinned by PLOS’ new Global Equity model designed to remove financial barriers for researchers and institutions across all geographies and funding backgrounds to participate in Open Access and Open Science at PLOS. PLOS is partnering with institutions in this modelto provide unlimited publication support for their authors through a single, annual fee that is based on each institution’s historical research output in the field and is reflective of their regional economy according to their country’s World Bank lending tier. PLOS’ existing fee-assistance program also supports authors who are unable to pay any portion of their publication fees.

“Our journal’s Open Science policies will help establish preprinting and sharing of data and code in water research communities. Early, unrestricted access to vetted data and papers will empower researchers, local and Indigenous communities, water professionals, and organizations from across the globe to take evidence-based action to address some of the most pressing issues our planet faces,” said Suzanne Farley, Editorial Director, PLOS.

The current Editorial Board is comprised of more than 70 Academic Editors and 19 Section Editors representing more than 32 countries. Submissions have been received from researchers in Chile, Uganda, Switzerland, Australia, Eswatini, the US, and 10 other countries, marking the global reach of PLOS Water.

Here are links to four of the papers that PLOS Water just published, as well as one opinion piece:

Jisc and Coherent Digital in deal for virtual reality and interactive video content

Jisc and Coherent Digital, a digital content and information services group, have signed an agreement to offer Mindscape Commons virtual reality (VR) content to both FE and HE institutions in the UK.

Mindscape Commons allows future counsellors, social workers, and psychologists to explore a variety of mental health experiences and to help students build empathy and develop critical clinical skills in a safe and repeatable setting. Content is enhanced with interactive quizzes, book chapters, discussion questions, and other tools to facilitate teaching and improve learning outcomes.

Launched in November 2020, Mindscape Commons is a source of VR and interactive video content for teaching and learning mental health. It offers hundreds of immersive and interactive, short-form, 360° and 2D videos for teaching and training. In service to the community, Mindscape Commons also aggregates and preserves open-source, research, and commercial VR content for free.

The agreement allows Jisc members to become members of Mindscape Commons. Elizabeth Robey, Publisher of Mindscape Commons, said:

“Jisc knows that digital technology has the ability to transform the student experience. We are honored to partner with Jisc in offering Mindscape Commons to members.”

Joe Pettican, Jisc’s licensing portfolio specialist for learning and teaching, said:

“There is huge potential to make greater use of new virtual reality technologies, offering students and learners with the opportunity to access immersive, engaging learning experiences and experiential learning that is not otherwise possible. As such, Jisc is committed to supporting institutions in providing innovative resources for learners and students.

“We are looking forward to working with Coherent Digital on this exciting opportunity for both FE and HE colleges in the UK to expand their digital resources in the increasingly important areas mental health and emerging technologies.”

The agreement began on 1 February 2022, and all participating Jisc member institutions and affiliated researchers are eligible.

CAS SciFinder Discovery Platform™ includes unique biosequence data collection and capabilities

CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society specializing in scientific information solutions, announces the launch of a major expansion of the CAS SciFinder Discovery Platform into life sciences. The enhanced platform includes over 2 million modified biosequences, 60 years of patent literature, and one of the largest collections of journal information including PubMed’s biomedical and life science data.

“The past decade has shown huge progress in biologic drug discovery. Research in oncology and inflammatory diseases is showing great promise, and more recently we have seen the first approved mRNA vaccines for COVID-19. As R&D increasingly relies on quality data to expedite discovery, a key challenge facing biomedical researchers is harnessing vast amounts of sequence data spread across thousands of sources,” says CAS President Manuel Guzman. “This significant expansion of the CAS SciFinder Discovery Platform underscores our commitment to life sciences by providing molecular biology researchers the high-quality information that chemists have relied on CAS for over the last 110 years.” 

The CAS SciFinder Discovery Platform expansion unlocks human-indexed insights from journals and patents in over 50 languages dating back to 1957 and 70 million biosequences curated by CAS scientists. The collection also includes unique biosequences not found elsewhere in electronic resources. 

“We are excited to bring this enhanced content collection to molecular biologists along with the powerful search and data visualization capabilities SciFinder has long been known for,” says CAS Chief Product Officer Tim Wahlberg. “This is an important step forward for our work in life sciences and is designed specifically to solve problems that researchers face every day.”

The launch is the culmination of an 18-month effort to curate over 600 million additional proteins and nucleotides and integrate BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), CDR (Complementarity-Determining Regions) for antibody and T-cell receptors, and motif search capabilities into the platform.

“Creating a single platform that integrates biosequence and small-molecule searching meant bringing together the best scientific and technical minds available. We took what we call a ‘synthetic-organic’ approach which we believe greatly enhances the scientific workflow, particularly if you are starting a research journey from a sequence,” says CAS Product Management Director Adam Sanford. “Our goal was to create the most meaningful and intuitive user experience possible, while allowing molecular biologists to collaborate seamlessly with chemists. The result is a platform designed by scientists for scientists, which we see as a powerful component in drug discovery.”

ConTech Pharma to provide rich resources to enhance the delegate experience

ConTech Pharma- Delivering successful FAIR data projects 1st and 2nd March 2022

ConTech Pharma sets the scene by saying what is FAIR data, or more importantly what purpose does this concept and its implementation fulfil?

Day 1 – an expert programme of speakers delivering describing the challenges, the initiatives and successful implementation. Speakers include Protocols.io, SciBite, Roche, Molecular Connections, STM, Pistoia Alliance, HDR and more.

Day 2 – interactive workshops creating important takeaways for FAIR data project implementation

All delegates will be offered resources ahead of time, to make that task easier ConTech Pharma is providing a short optional reading list. Briefly described here:

New to the topic: Foundations: Read one of the foundational papers.

If you know the foundations but want to read the current thinking. Implementation: The latest work on FAIR data has been moving beyond the initial principles towards the practicalities of implementation.

Finally, we recommend Maturity indicators: looking at how to assess data fitness and prioritise efforts with maturity indicators – in particular there has been some great work in this area

100% online all speaker sessions will be available to registered delegates post event

Be involved in this important event – Take the opportunity to hear from experts with the experience of undertaking digital transformation with FAIR data; ask questions and then take part in an online workshop to discuss and build a network of likeminded professionals seeking to achieve the same results that you are.

If you are a publisher, content strategist or curator, R & D scientist, pharma or digital healthcare professional it’s time to register for this event. Senior executives from across Pharma and Publishing already registered – join them at ConTech Pharma and take the plunge, register here: https://www.contech-event.com/ConTechPharma2022  

Canadian Science Publishing announces new guidelines for reporting community-engaged research in manuscripts

Canadian Science Publishing is excited to share guidelines to help researchers report community-engaged research (CER) in manuscripts. CER is a growing area that involves researchers and communities collaborating to advance community goals and science. With the rise in queries from authors and submissions across our journals on CER, we developed these guidelines to support transparent reporting of studies that include community participation. 

We hope these guidelines will help researchers clearly demonstrate how the community was involved throughout the research process and how the study benefits the community. As the level of community involvement will vary by research project, some of the guidelines may not be applicable to every manuscript.

We extend our sincere appreciation for the input and expertise of editors, researchers, Elders, and community members who provided feedback on these guidelines.

To encourage inclusive research practices, we will continue to listen, learn, and create new resources for authors and readers. We look forward to sharing future updates to our policies. Feedback is more than welcome. Please direct questions, comments, and suggestions to Rachel Pietersma. 

IET Inspec demonstrates continued quality through ISO 9001 recertification

Following a recertification assessment by BSI, IET Inspec has been recommended for recertification to the ISO9001:2015 quality standard for its production system.

IET Inspec prides itself on the quality and the integrity of its data, working to the highest level of service and satisfaction to maintain rigorous standards for its production process. Upholding this internationally recognised certification aligns with these values.  

Giles Grant, Director of Knowledge Services and Solutions at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), states: “The IET works to uphold the highest standards in our systems and processes on a daily basis, and we are pleased to have demonstrated this during our recent audit to successfully retain certification to the latest version of the ISO 9001 standard.”

The ISO is an independent, non-governmental international organization. Achieving certification to the latest version of the ISO 9001 quality standard is an indicator of quality and consistency, ensuring that specific requirements for a quality management system are followed.

IET Inspec first achieved ISO 9001 certification in 2005 and undergoes recertification every three years in addition to regular audits by the British Standards Institution (BSI), a member body of the ISO, in order to maintain its certification to the latest version of the ISO 9001.

IET Inspec is one of the most definitive databases for subject-specific and interdisciplinary research in the fields of engineering, physics and computer science. It contains over 21 million records of research literature, and for 50 years it’s been an essential discovery tool to numerous prestigious institutions around the world. 

Peer J introduces an innovative program to reward contributors with genuine benefits

PeerJ, the award-winning Open Access publisher, has announced an innovative new reward program for peer review contributions. Based on contributors earning PeerJ Tokens for each submission they peer review or edit, the publisher aims to address two of the major issues facing peer review and scientific communication: lack of reward for the time and effort put in by editors and reviewers; and the general congestion of peer review. “By fairly incentivising engagement and contribution we hope that more academics and researchers will sign up to review submissions made to our seven journals” says Pete Binfield, PeerJ’s Publisher and Co-Founder. “We know that our contributors’ time is valuable, and we think they deserve to be rewarded for their contributions.”

The Tokens program is flexible and fair. Tokens can be accumulated over time, as they have no expiry date, and they can be combined (or ‘stacked’) to maximize a contributor’s Article Processing Charge (APC) discount. Co-authors can pool their Tokens and allocate them to a single submission, and contributors can even transfer their Tokens to another PeerJ user to help them towards their publication fees. Tokens – and the equivalent discount they are entitled to – are commensurate with the contribution made by users, rewarding those who do more.

“We’re listening to the communities that we work with. They are frustrated by spiralling and frankly scandalous prices of Open Access publishing, especially because, without their contribution, the scholarly publishing system would fall apart. We are aiming to make peer review rewarding for every party involved and do more to make open accessible to all,” says Nathaniel Gore, PeerJ’s Director of Communities.

Users earn Tokens for reviewing and editing. Prospective reviewers can sign up to the new PeerJ Reviewer Match. Upon receiving their first invitation to review, they will receive 5 Tokens – equivalent to a $50 discount – whether they accept the invitation or not. From them on, for each submission they peer review, they will earn another 10 Tokens – a $100 discount. Academic Editors can also earn Tokens for handling submissions. There is no limit on the APC discount that can be earned, meaning that active reviewers and editors can claim a 100% discount. 

“In 2022 we are celebrating a decade of PeerJ and we have no intention of standing still,” says Jason Hoyt, PeerJ’s Co-Founder and CEO, “Journals today mostly act as if the only person on the field contributing is the quarterback or forward. Even worse, publishers like to think that they’re the star of the show. It’s about time we started to do more to recognize and reward the researchers who are responsible for the bulk of scholarly knowledge by making peer review work for them.” 

Researchers can find out more at https://peerj.com/about/contributor-rewards 

Wiley and the Slovenian Academic Consortium Sign Open Access Agreement

Global research and education leader Wiley today announced a new three-year agreement with the Slovenian Academic Consortium (CTK consortium) to accelerate open access research.

The agreement allows 10 member institutions across Slovenia to access to all of Wiley’s hybrid and subscription journals and grants researchers the ability to publish accepted articles open access in all of Wiley’s 1,400 hybrid journals. This represents one of the first fully transitional agreements for the consortium and will allow the majority of its research to be published open access.

“We’re excited to  bring world-class findings to the widest possible audience across Slovenia through this partnership with CTK consortium,” said Liz Ferguson, Senior Vice President, Wiley Research Publishing.

“With this transformative agreement, the CTK consortium has met the expectations of its users and provided a suitable infrastructure for open publications in accordance with the principles of the Horizon Europe program, the principles of Coalitions S (of which Slovenian Research Agency is a member), and the principles of the newly adopted Slovenian legislation in the field of science research work. The new legislation includes strict requirements for open publication of all results conducted with publicly funded scientific research work,” said Miro Pušnik, director of CTK. 

Wiley has open access agreements with a variety of institutions, consortia and government entities globally, including those signed with the National Research Council of Science & Technology in the Republic of Korea and the Carolina Consortium in the U.S. just this year.

STM Report – Open Access, Open Data Increase Demand for STM Online Services

Whether fueled by a global arms race in research and development, the movement towards open research, or the mobilization against coronavirus — the number of research papers and associated data produced each year is exploding. By one estimate, the COVID-19 literature published from January 2020 to May 2020 reached more than 23,000 papers and is doubling every 20 days. The number of scholarly articles posted to the Directory of Open Access Journals is growing at 15% per year.

As this corpus of content and data grows and more of it is made open by research funder mandates, the value publishers provide will shift back toward discovery and integration — this according to the most recent report from Simba Information, a leader in media and publishing intelligence.

The report STM Online Services 2021-2025 focuses on the databases that offer online content or abstracting and indexing and are sold to academic, government and commercial customers. It found that between 2018 and 2021, online services revenue grew at a compound annual rate of 5.1% after elimination of trade between competitors — faster than STM journals or books.

Scientific, technical and medical publishers face upheaval from open access and open data, but this transition represents opportunity in online services, particularly for competitors that can develop broader discovery tools and dynamic content capabilities to win users’ loyalty.

Many of the products and services are already considered “must have” information sold in multi-year, multi-million-dollar bundles.

The larger players will ultimately gain the most from this new opportunity. They have largely turned their attention to author and researcher engagement—a key point of differentiation and competition between publishers in the STM online services market.

STM Online Services 2021-2025 provides detailed market information for STM online services, segmented by: sci-tech standards, patents and online content, drug databases, clinical reference, training and certification, reference management and analytical tools, sci-tech abstracting and indexing, medical abstracting and indexing. It analyzes trends impacting the industry and forecasts market growth to 2025. The report includes an in-depth review of 10 leading scientific and technical publishers, including American Chemical Society, Clarivate Analytics, Elsevier, IHS Markit, IBM Watson Health, Wolters Kluwer, and others.

Figshare awarded NIH Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative grant to enhance functionality for research community

Figshare is pleased to participate in a new NIH initiative, the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI). GREI is led by the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS) and provides funding for repositories to grow their functionality and better meet the needs of research communities and the NIH Desirable Characteristics for Data Repositories. 

Generalist and institutional repositories play a key role in the data sharing landscape, bridging the gap between raw data and scientific outcomes by helping researchers share data in a way that is discoverable, reusable and trackable. A healthy repository ecosystem involves cooperation and the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative aims to establish a framework for collaboration and best practice. 

Alongside Figshare, five other repositories — Center for Open Science, Dataverse, Dryad, Mendeley Data and Vivli — will work to improve infrastructure, standards for data sharing, and better serve users and the research community overall. 

The award granted to Figshare will be led by Principal Investigators Mark Hahnel (Figshare’s Founder and CEO) and Ana Van Gulick (Figshare’s Government and Funder Lead), and will support ongoing efforts to always be advancing our repository infrastructure to make research data better documented for findability and reuse. As part of this project, Figshare will be expanding our support for metadata standards to enhance discoverability and tracking of open research such as implementing ROR to identify research organizations, furthering our ORCID integrations for more authors, specifying the relationship types for related material DOIs, and broadening our metadata support for research funders and grants. 

The team will also explore automated methods that could be employed to enhance the FAIR-ness of data and metadata in a scalable way. Additionally, the project will include outreach efforts to better understand the use cases for generalist repositories and provide training to researchers on using Figshare and applying data sharing best practices. 

Founder and CEO of Figshare, Mark Hahnel, said: “At Figshare we want to open data to the world. We are thrilled to be involved in the NIH’s GREI initiative, which presents an important opportunity to work alongside others to pave the way for generalist repositories to serve their users even better by making their data FAIR-er and more discoverable.”

The initiative will allow Figshare to continue to support both the NIH-funded and broader research community and to expand on the lessons learned from our previous work with the NIH ODSS to pilot a generalist repository, NIH Figshare, for NIH-funded data in 2019-2020. 

The work will include collaboration with other generalist repositories in friendly “coopetition”: a phrase that emerged at an NIH Workshop on the Role of Generalist Repositories in February 2020, with the aim to identify common standards and practices for all repositories to employ to more fully support discoverable and reusable open research data. In collaboration with the NIH and our GREI partners, we plan to share updates and outcomes of this project on our blog as well as through public events and websites. All code and materials produced as part of this project will be made publicly available for reuse via software repositories and figshare.com.

For more information on GREI, please visit the Office of Data Science Strategy’s website.

PLOS Climate publishes first papers

The Public Library of Science (PLOS) today announced that PLOS Climate published its initial cohort of papers. The journal’s mission is to disseminate rigorous science that empowers researchers, policymakers, governments, international organizations, and industry to understand dynamic, changing climates and take positive, evidence-based action in the face of climate change. The journal has so far received more than 85 submissions from researchers around the world.

“This is such an opportune moment to be launching PLOS Climate – at a time where, more than ever, robust science must provide the basis for decision-making in one of the most critical challenges facing the planet,” said Emma Archer, Editor-in-Chief, PLOS Climate. “We hope to be a platform for communicating that science, with a strong emphasis on opportunities for early career researchers in addition to established researchers, as well as those from groups and countries traditionally underrepresented in this field.”

“We seek to amplify the voices of climate experts around the globe to highlight knowledge from diverse regions and foster collaboration that accelerates progress at a global scale,” said Jamie Males, Executive Editor, PLOS Climate. “The broad scope of our journal will provide multi-disciplinary perspectives that help decision-makers develop holistic strategies to address the causes and effects of climate change on every level.”

PLOS announced the launch of five new journals last year and PLOS Climate is the third of these journals with papers ready for publication. All PLOS journals are underpinned by institutional business models that move beyond the article processing charge (APC) to ensure more equitable and regionally appropriate ways to support Open Access publishing. PLOS Climate utilizes our Global Equity Model. PLOS’ existing fee-assistance program also supports authors who are unable to pay any portion of their publication fees.

The Editorial Board represents the full diversity of the research and researchers in the field.
It is comprised of more than 120 editors representing more than 35 countries, including 22 Section Editors from 16 countries, and reflects PLOS’ commitments towards building diverse, equitable and inclusive editorial boards.

Here are links to four papers that PLOS Climate just published, as well as three opinion pieces:

Karen McNamara and colleagues identify lessons for climate change adaptation in the Pacific Islands

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