On Open Access in The Netherlands

Yesterday, I received a letter from the Association of Universities The Netherlands (VSNU, @deVSNU) about Open Access. The Netherlands is for research a very interesting country: it’s small, meaning we have few resources to establish and maintain high profile centers, we also believe strong education benefits from distribution, so we we have many good universities, rather than a few excelling universities. Mind you, this clouds that we absolutely do have excelling research institutes and research groups; they just are not concentrated in one university. 7 minute read

Jean-Claude Bradley, Blue Obelisk award winner

Chemistry in Second Life. DOI:10.1186/1752-153X-3-14 There are nowadays a lot of people talking about Open, about open access, open data, open source. In fact, some discussion on Twitter resulted in the realization that it is highly unlikely that any scholar has not taken advantage of Open in some way in their research in the last few years. However, this is mostly due to people whom actually do, not by those who talk about it or use it. 1 minute read

Slow publishing innovation: SMILES in ACS journals

Elsevier is not the only publisher with a large innovation inertia. In fact, I think many large organizations do, particularly if there are too many interdependencies, causing too long lines. Greg Laundrum made me aware that one American Chemical Society journal is now going to encourage (not require) machine readable forms of chemical structures to be included in their flagship. The reasoning by Gilson et al. is balanced. It is also 15 years too late. This question was relevant at the end of the last century. The technologies were already more advanced than what will now be adopted. 15 years!!! Seriously, that’s close to the time it takes to bring a new drug on the market! 2 minute read

Elsevier's new text mining initiative is a step sideways

Elsevier’s new ideas on text mining are getting a lot attention now. Sadly, they get it wrong, again. On the bright side, all other publishers, which are expected to follow this year, can learn from this mistake. 7 minute read

Programming in the Life Sciences #13: Another screenshot

I got a one more source code zip file from the Maastricht Science Programme students (see also the first two screenshots). Vincent and Błażej extended the d3.js tree view, showing classification information from ChEBI (they also submitted three patches to the Open PHACTS ops.js): less than 1 minute read

Programming in the Life Sciences #12: First screenshots

Yesterday was the last Programming in the Life Sciences practical day, and the 2nd and 3rd year B.Sc. MSC students presented their results yesterday afternoon. I am impressed with the results that they reached in only six practical days. I have suggested them to upload the presentations to SlideShare or FigShare (with the advantage that you get a DOI), and asked them to send them their tools. Below are some screenshots. less than 1 minute read

Looking for a PhD and a Postdoc to work on Open Science Nanosafety

I am happy that I got my first research grant awarded (EU FP7), which should start after all the contracts are signed, etc, somewhere early 2014. The project is about setting up data needs for the analysis of nanosafety studies. And for this, I have the below two position vacancies available now. If you are keen on doing Open Science (CDK, Bioclipse, OpenTox, WikiPathways, …, …), working within the European NanoSafety Cluster, and have an affinity with understanding the systems biology of nanomaterials, then you may be interested in applying. less than 1 minute read