Feature Articles

Scientists Manage Research with Open Source Zotero

Citation management tools are an easy way to organize electronic citations and PDFs into a single interface. They also allow you to export citations as a formatted bibliography. Many of them will also interact with a word processor for in-text citations. The two biggest cost-free, client-based tools are Mendeley and Zotero. I’m going to focus on Zotero, which is free and open source. It’s also the tool I like most for handling my own citations...

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Who Should Head the VA?

...last Saturday, Cosgrove suddenly withdrew his name from consideration, stating that he still had work that needed doing at the Cleveland Clinic. What might that work be? Just hours before Cosgrove made his announcement, the intrepid trade magazine Modern Healthcare published a little noticed article that revealed a long pattern of safety problems at the Cleveland Clinic—problems that were so serious that the federal government repeatedly threatened to shut off the $1 billion a year the clinic collects from Medicare.

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Mozilla's Science Lab Is a Hub for the Open Research Community

Since the launch last June of Mozilla Science Lab, we’ve been working to unpack what science on the web and like the web means, and what Mozilla can do to support it. The Science Lab was created to serve as a neutral broker and hub for the open science community—a means of bridging the gap between the early adopters and the many scientists who understand the value of open science, but who have not yet (for a number of reasons) mapped that understanding onto their day-to-day workflow...

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The ONC 10 Year Vision

On June 5th 2014, ONC released  “Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: a 10-Year Vision to Achieve an Interoperable Health IT Infrastructure." The plan is divided in 3 year goals, 6 year goals, and 10 year goals. Five specific tactics support the strategies. Below is a summary of the report and a few comments from my Massachusetts experience that support the reasonableness of the ONC goals.

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Spain's Extremadura Region Switches Healthcare Sector to Open Source

The desktop computer systems of government healthcare organizations in the Spanish region of Extremadura all rely on free and open source software solutions. Over the past year, close to 10,000 computer workstations in public health care organizations have migrated to a customized version of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Read More »

International Team of Scientists Open Sources Search for Malaria Cure

The Open Source Malaria (OSM) project operates along very similar lines to traditional medicinal chemistry projects in that the team is looking for an antimalarial drug candidate suitable for Phase 1 clinical trials. However, the day to day running of the project works quite differently and is probably most clearly defined by the team’s commitment to The Six Laws of Open Science... Read More »

How VA Outsourcing Hurts Veterans

On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, announced that he had reached a compromise with John McCain and other Senate Republicans on how to fix whatever it is that needs fixing at the VA...the bill also contains one provision that is a significant concession to Republican enemies of government. If enacted, it would lower the quality of health care received by veterans while setting back the movement for health care delivery system reform generally.

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A Case for Open Peer Review for Clinical Trials

A few weeks ago I played the part of an expert witness in the Medical Journalist Association’s mock trial, Trials on Trial. The charge was: “Is the current system of publishing clinical trials fit for purpose?” The jury’s verdict was a resounding ‘no’. You can read more about the event in Jane Feinmann’s write up on the BMJ Group Blogs.

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The ONC Reorganization

Many people have asked me to explain the recent reorganization at ONC, reducing 17 different offices to 10...Simply, the era of stimulus has ended and ONC no longer has the operating budget to do as many projects as fast as during the era of ARRA... Read More »

VA Care: Still The Best Care Anywhere?

...[A]s the author of the title Best Care Anywhere, Why VA Health Care would be Better for Everyone, it’s been dispiriting to have it confirmed by a preliminary inspector general’s report that some frontline VA employees in Phoenix and elsewhere have been gaming a key performance metric regarding wait times. But what’s really has me enervated is how the dominant media narrative of the VA “scandal” has become so essentially misleading and damaging to the cause of health care delivery system reform...

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Why Open Source Is the Future of Clinical Trials

Clinovo is a Clinical Research Organization (CRO) that partners with life science companies to streamline their clinical trials. Their CTO Marc Desgrousilliers is managing the development of ClinCapture, their open source Electronic Data Capture (EDC) system. In this interview, he tells us more about why healthcare needs open source and why it is the future of clinical trials... Read More »

How African Hospitals Can Be Helped Through Open Source ERP and EHR Software

The daily management and operation of a hospital requires enormous effort. These days, most hospitals utilize Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to centralize facility operations including inventory, budgets, invoicing, and employee management.Any hospital administrator will tell you that ERP software is essential to efficiently managing their hospital as the software lowers inventory costs and improves efficiencies and quality.

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Rethinking Open Source Collaboration

The open source world has been through a significant period of change in the last fifteen years. What started out as volunteers getting together to work on projects for fun has now turned into a billion-dollar industry. Although the spotlight is shone on open source more than ever before and the technology and tools have evolved, the core fundamentals of how we build open source software are still the same at their core – yet the rigor and quality expectations have changed. I think this is a great opportunity for our wider community as well as an organization.

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The Maker Movement Helps Transform Our Public Libraries

The small town of Bethlehem, New York purchased a 3D printer and started teaching classes at its public library recently—jumpstarting the community's knowledge of advanced manufacturing and building upon a new way of doing things in a world where physical bookstores are dissappearing. It's true. Public libraries are reinventing themselves. Today they are becoming less of a place that hosts physical books and more of a center where people collaborate, commune, and learn new things...

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Five Open Source Tools Libraries Need to Know About

There was a time when working in the library I found it very frustrating (as many librarians do) that there were so few options for software that actually did what I needed. In libraries we're so used to there being this vendor=software model. Where one vendor controls a product and while there might be other similar products, they too are controlled by a vendor. This is why libraries need to take a closer look at open source software. By removing the "owner" (aka the vendor) from the equation we get a lot more freedom to make software that does what we want, how we want, when we want. One of the hardest thing to teach libraries who are switching to an open source solution is that the power is now in their hands to direct the software...