open science

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Bio-Linux: A Stable, Portable Scientific Research Linux Distribution

Bio-Linux was introduced and detailed in a Nature Biotechnology paper in July 2006. The distribution was a group effort by the Natural Environment Research Council in the UK. As the creators and authors point out, the analysis demands of high-throughput "-omic" (genomic, proteomic, metabolomic) science has necessitated the development of integrated computing solutions to analyze the resultant mountains of experimental data. From this need, Bio-Linux was born. The distribution, according to its creators, serves as a "free bioinformatics workstation platform that can be installed on anything from a laptop to a large server." The current distro version, Bio-Linux 8, is built on an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS base. Thus, the general look and feel of Bio-Linux is similar to that of Ubuntu.

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Breaking Good: School Students Make Costly Drug Cheaply Using Open Source Approach

Press Release | University of Sydney | November 30, 2016

Sydney Grammar students, under the supervision of the University of Sydney and global members of the Open Source Malaria consortium, have reproduced an essential medicine in their high school laboratories. The drug, Daraprim, had been the subject of controversy when the price was hiked from US $13.50 to US$750 a dose last year. Daraprim - originally used as an antimalarial after its synthesis by Nobel Prize winner Gertrude Elion - is now more widely used as an anti-parasitic treatment for toxoplasmosis, which can be a dangerous disease for pregnant women and people with compromised immune systems, such as those living with HIV or AIDS...

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Broad Institute to Release Genome Analysis Toolkit 4 (GATK4) as Open Source Resource to Accelerate Research

Press Release | Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard | May 24, 2017

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard will release version 4 of the industry-leading Genome Analysis Toolkit under an open source software license. The software package, designated GATK4, contains new tools and rebuilt architecture. It is available currently as an alpha preview on the Broad Institute's GATK website, with a beta release expected in mid-June. Broad engineers announced the upgrade, as well as the decision to release the tool as an open source product, at Bio-IT World today...

Can Open Science Help Patients And Save Pharma?

Open science research and development hybrid development model can protect pharma company profits while reducing costs of medicines for consumers Read More »

Cashing In on Transparency in Science

Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato | Science | January 7, 2016

Psychologist Brian Nosek believes that reproducibility is a core principle of science. To promote the idea, he co-founded a nonprofit organization in 2013 that allows scientists to publish a description of their experiments before they conduct them. This week Nosek’s Center for Open Science (COS) went a step further, offering $1000 to every scientist who preregisters their protocol with COS. The payment is meant to be a carrot leading to greater transparency and accountability in research, says Nosek, a professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville...

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Child Mind Institute's Healthy Brain Network Releases Open Dataset

Press Release | Child Mind Institute | June 14, 2017

The Child Mind Institute today announced the release of the first dataset from the groundbreaking Healthy Brain Network study, and the inauguration of the Healthy Brain Network Biobank. The study and the open access Biobank address the pressing need for a large, comprehensive dataset that researchers will use to leverage new technologies and develop tools for diagnosing and managing mental health and learning disorders...

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Clinical Trial Reporting Failures Can Harm Research, Patients

Patrick Skerrett | STAT | December 18, 2015

Hospitals, medical schools, businesses, and even the National Institutes of Health are routinely violating a federal law requiring clinical trials to be reported to the public, a STAT investigation recently found. In response, we asked experts to offer their thoughts on why low rates of clinical trial reporting is a problem, and what can be done about it...

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Coding in a Safe Place

The Python Software Foundation's (PSF) Director Carol Willing is ready for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women conference to start on October 14. One of the many highlights of her week will most definitely be the Open Source Day Codeathon, where some attendees will be making their very first contributions to open source. Carol will be mentoring coders for OpenHatch and the Systers' Volunteer Management System. OpenHatch matches people with projects, and Systers is the largest tech forum for women in the world. Learn more about these projects, and the PSF's role at Grace Hopper this year, in this interview.

Controlled Substances Compliance Expert Community Established

Press Release | Pistoia Alliance | August 11, 2014

The Pistoia Alliance Controlled Substances Compliance Services (CSCS) project has made it significantly easier for life science companies to comply with controlled substance legislation by establishing an expert community to interpret the often-ambiguous rules. Read More »

Council of the European Union calls for full open access to scientific research by 2020

A few weeks ago we wrote about how the European Union is pushing ahead its support for open access to EU-funded scientific research and data. Today at the meeting of the Competitiveness Council of the European Union, the Council reinforced the commitment to making all scientific articles and data openly accessible and reusable by 2020. In its communication, the Council offered several conclusions on the transition towards an open science system:

Data From 14 Million Papers Is Now Available for Free

June Javelosa | Futurism | April 8, 2017

The Initiative of Open Citations (140C) announced today that science papers’ reference lists will now be accessible to anyone. As explained on their website, “citations are the links that knit together our scientific and cultural knowledge. They are primary data that provide both provenance and an explanation for how we know facts. They allow us to attribute and credit scientific contributions, and they enable the evaluation of research and its impacts. In sum, citations are the most important vehicle for the discovery, dissemination, and evaluation of all scholarly knowledge”...

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Duke Clinical Research Institute and SAS Open Heart-Disease Data to Researchers

Press Release | Supporting Open Access for Researchers (SOAR), Duke Clinical Research Institute, SAS | May 4, 2016

A new collaboration will give more researchers access to the largest and oldest cardiovascular database in the world. The Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) and analytics leader SAS will provide researchers worldwide with data management and analytics tools to explore 45 years of cardiovascular patient data collected by the Duke University Health System. The DCRI and SAS share the goal of greater transparency and openness in research to improve patient care to find new ways to treat heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States...

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European Commission Considering Leap into Open-Access Publishing

Martin Enserink | Science | March 29, 2017

One of Europe’s biggest science spenders could soon branch out into publishing. The European Commission, which spends more than €10 billion annually on research, may follow two other big league funders, the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and set up a “publishing platform” for the scientists it funds, in an attempt to accelerate the transition to open-access publishing in Europe...

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European Union Pushing Ahead in Support of Open Science

April saw lots of activity on the open science front in the European Union. On April 19, the European Commission officially announced its plans to create an “Open Science Cloud”. Accompanying this initiative, the Commission stated it will require that scientific data produced by projects under Horizon 2020 (Europe’s €80 billion science funding program) be made openly available by default. Making open data the default will ensure that the scientific community, companies, and the general public can enjoy broad access (and reuse rights) to data generated by European funded scientific projects. 

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Five Ways Consortia Can Catalyse Open Science

Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Karen S. Baker, Nicholas Berente, Courtney Flint, Gabriel Gershenfeld, Brandon Grant, Michael Haberman, John Leslie King, Christine Kirkpatrick, Barbara Lawrence, Spenser Lewis, W. Christopher Lenhardt, Matthew Mayernik, Charles McElroy, Barbara Mittleman, Namchul Shin, Shelley Stall, Susan Winter& Ilya Zaslavsky | Nature | March 29, 2017

“I am going to my grave with my disk drive in my cold dead hands.” So a senior scientist told a junior researcher, who related the tale at a 2013 US National Science Foundation (NSF) workshop on the reuse of physical samples in the geosciences. Sharing — of data sets, metadata, models, software and other resources — promises to speed discoveries, improve reproducibility and expand economic development. But it requires people to change. Overcoming personal reluctance is doubly difficult because many aspects of the scientific enterprise undermine sharing. Right now, most departments, funders and journals presume that data are proprietary from collection to publication..

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