News

World Health Organization Goes Open Access-Joins PubMed Central

Back in January, the global health authority, the World Health Organisation (WHO), announced the launch of a new open access policy to ensure the widespread dissemination of scientific research. The policy, which applies to all WHO-authored or WHO-funded research published in external journals and books, kicked into action on 1st July 2014.

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Heliox Project to Assist Indigenous Communities Access Computers

Indigenous communities may benefit from new computer technology that allows them to access educational resources and the internet using their own language, says the software’s developer. The innovation comes from an international, interdisciplinary group that is currently working on using the technology to reduce the digital gap and help protect cultural diversity in Mexico. This effort is part of a wider project called Heliox, which is developing a free, inclusive operating system using a version of the existing fully open-source GNU/Linux system. Read More »

Pistoia Alliance Driving Open Innovation in Bioresearch

The Pistoia Alliance recently held its 4th Annual Conference at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. As part of the Next Chapter Initiative this was widened to a three-day event to include a special members-only meeting on the second day, kindly hosted by Thomson Reuters at their headquarters in Times Square, and a face-to-face board meeting hosted by Roche at the Alexandria Centre. Read More »

Crafting a Next Generation IT strategy

During my 16 years as CIO, I’ve witnessed the transition from client server to web, from desktops to mobile, and from locally hosted to cloud. As Beth Israel Deaconess merges and acquires more hospitals, more practices and more care management capabilities, what are its strategic IT choices?...

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Karen Sandler Addresses Open Source's "Identity Crisis"

For Karen Sandler, software freedom isn't simply a technical matter. Nor is it a purely ideological one. It's a matter of life and death. Sandler, Executive Director of the non-profit Software Freedom Conservancy, says software freedom became personal when she realized her pacemaker/defibrillator was running code she couldn't analyze. For nearly a decade—first at the Software Feedom Law Center, then at the GNOME Foundation before Conservancy—she's been an advocate for the right to examine the software on which our lives depend...

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Clueless or Craven? The White House Gets the VA Story Exactly Backwards

Sad to say, the Obama administration seems clueless about what might be broken at the VA and how to fix it. Either that, or it is just cravenly saying and doing whatever it thinks is necessary to make the story go away. Evidence for the clueless hypothesis came on Friday, when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Nabors weighed in with his diagnosis (pdf) of what ails the VA. The document is extraordinary in its contradictions, sloppy formulations, and non-evidence-based conclusions.

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Is Robert A. McDonald Fit to be VA Secretary?

President Obama's nominee to head the [VA] is now Robert A McDonald, former CEO of Procter and Gamble...Yet aside from a single article on the Ring of Fire web site, all news coverage and discussion so far has ignored Mr McDonald's previous experience in health care leadership, but also that his relevant track record ought to raise questions about his fitness for the VA position.

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How Three College Students Built a Health Provider Search Site in Six Weeks - A Lesson for the Federal Government

In six weeks, a team of three college students with no industry experience and only academic software-specific knowledge, developed and designed a health care provider search system using only open source software. To tell you how they got there, let's start with a little history of open source software in the US federal government workspace... Read More »

7 Rules of Thumb for Your Open Science Project

Tips for creating and maintaining open source software for science. Read More »

Doctors Use Wikipedia to Collaborate in the Production of Quality Medical Information

Six years ago, Doctor James Heilman was working a night shift in the ER when he came across an error-ridden article on Wikipedia. Someone else might have used the article to dismiss the online encyclopedia, which was then less than half the size it is now. Instead, Heilman decided to improve the article. “I noticed an edit button and realized that I could fix it. Sort of got hooked from there. I’m still finding lots of articles that need a great deal of work before they reflect the best available medical evidence.”

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