Group items tagged

"The Norwegian Electronic Health Library - information in English The Norwegian Electronic Health Library (Helsebiblioteket.no) is a publicly funded online knowledge service for healthcare professionals and students in Norway. 02/01/2014 | Hans Petter Fosseng Prof. Magne Nylenna MD is editor-in-chief for the Norwegian Electronic Health Library (Helsebiblioteket.no). Photo: Hans Petter Fosseng The Norwegian Electronic Health Library is accessed online through the website www.helsebiblioteket.no. The website provides free access to point-of-care tools, guidelines, systematic reviews, scientific journals, and a wide variety of other full-text resources for health-care professionals and students."

"The Norwegian Electronic Health Library - information in English The Norwegian Electronic Health Library (Helsebiblioteket.no) is a publicly funded online knowledge service for healthcare professionals and students in Norway. 02/01/2014 | Hans Petter Fosseng Prof. Magne Nylenna MD is editor-in-chief for the Norwegian Electronic Health Library (Helsebiblioteket.no). Photo: Hans Petter Fosseng The Norwegian Electronic Health Library is accessed online through the website www.helsebiblioteket.no. The website provides free access to point-of-care tools, guidelines, systematic reviews, scientific journals, and a wide variety of other full-text resources for health-care professionals and students."

"HINARI Programme set up by WHO together with major publishers, enables low- and middle- income countries to gain access to one of the world's largest collections of biomedical and health literature. Up to 13,000 journals (in 30 different languages), up to 29,000 e-books, up to 70 other information resources are now available to health institutions in more than 100 countries, areas and territories benefiting many thousands of health workers and researchers, and in turn, contributing to improve world health."

Considering digital identities, here's an interesting article over a new form of data privacy: our health. As health devices (i.e. smart watches) become more available and mainstream we should consider what type of data we want 'floating' around the internet such as our weights/BMIs or whatever other personal information the health device may obtain. This is one issue that the increase in technology and social communication has brought to us (not entirely a bad thing)…more personal data becoming easily accessible for advertisers. "This week, Apple has updated its privacy policy to try and ensure that developers don't market personal healthcare data to advertisers and brokers. The company is betting big on its new HealthKit platform, part of iOS 8. It gives developers a set of APIs to share their apps' data with Apple's […]"

New plans to improve health outcomes and the quality of patient care through digital technology and innovation have been unveiled by national health and social care organisations today (13 November 2014).

Breaking new ground for the open-access movement, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a major funder of global health research, plans to require that the researchers it funds publish only in immediate open-access journals. The policy doesn't kick in until January 2017; until then, grantees can publish in subscription-based journals as long as their paper is freely available within 12 months.

This serves as a significant catalyst to change the mentality of both the researcher and the funder. The Gates Foundation is a leading organization in resolving world health issues. This action demonstrates their drive and desire toward their cause; and will hopefully it will start a trend amongst authors and other research funding NGOS.

As mentioned in class discussions, this is the only reasonable response. Bill and Melinda have put their time forth into creating charities, and attempting to control content which was given from charitable grants is lunacy. It is comforting to see the Gates foundation scrapping the 6-12 month window of restriction. WIth this said that said, this draws interesting parallels with journals that receive government grants due to the fact that the privately sold resource is already being funded by the tax payers.

This is a Wikipedia book on health care, a collection of Wikipedia articles that can be easily saved, rendered electronically, and ordered as a printed book

I've saved this because it identifies a facet of open knowledge that is becoming increasingly important - the concept of "open manufacturing". Additive manufacturing - or 3D printing as it is more commonly known - is being used in more industry sectors than ever before. New materials and use cases have led to 3D manufacturing in Health, Entertainment, Automobiles, Fashion, Construction etc. I particularly liked this quote from David Rowan at Wired: "The democratisation of manufacturing will empower anyone with a compelling idea to prototype, make and launch a physical product ay speed and low cost".

There's a lot to digest here, particularly if you want to read the whole report as well as the edited summary. I particularly liked the responses from JP Rangaswami: "The quality of real-time information that becomes available will take the guesswork out of much of capacity planning and decision-making......The net effect will be to reduce waste everywhere: in physical flows and logistics, in the movement of people and goods; in logical flows and logistics, in the movement of ideas and information; decisions will be made faster and better, based on more accurate information; prior errors in assumption and planning will be winkled out more effectively." And from Howard Rheingold: "We will live in a world where many things won't work, and nobody will know how to fix them." On a personal note, I can see there might be benefits with the IoT, particularly the use of sensors and actuators for monitoring and improving health, but will it put the final nail in 'privacy' and enable marketers to push their products and control my thoughts 24 x 7 through the pervasive use of wearable devices and biological interfaces with technology? Reading time: 60 mins

This is a brief synopsis covering the main aspects of Research4Life, including information about the creators and stakeholders, criteria for access, its composition and training given. In 2001 Research4Life was initially started by WHO with HINARI (Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative) to enable developing countries to access free or greatly subsidized biomedical and health literature. From 2003-09 this type of access to the AGORA, OARE and ARDI databases of scientific journals and books became available to over 77 poorer developing countries by Cornell and Yale Universities, FAO, UNEP and WIPO with other publishers. Institutions are required to meet specific criteria and categories to be entitled to the right to use of Research4Life resources. A few case studies are described which clearly show the impact Research4Life has had so far. We are informed of the future plans for the project too. This article gives a clear insight into how first world organisations are giving researchers and the populace of less developed countries the opportunity to advance their own research and development by providing access to current information and data.

As a librarian, research4life boosts my morale. Truly, librarians can be the unsung heroes in scientific researches. Librarians happily serve researchers without expecting anything but ensuring that they get the information they need. Research4life values the role of the librarians in the field of research and I appreciate that. I wish to express my gratitude to resesarch4life organization for giving value to the contribution of librarians in research

This is one of many examples to read about lack of privacy. I find this entry so interesting because of the importance from our privacy from a government point of view. Think about the big amount of information they have about us: health, financial, educational, and so on. It may arrive one day in which some of our politicals will be intelligent enough and will create a centralised database with all these information. Poor of us the day it arrives!

from website: "Bioline International is a not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries. BI's goal of reducing the South to North knowledge gap is crucial to a global understanding of health (tropical medicine, infectious diseases, epidemiology, emerging new diseases), biodiversity, the environment, conservation and international development. By providing a platform for the distribution of peer-reviewed journals (currently from Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, India, Iran, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda and Venezuela), BI helps to reduce the global knowledge divide by making bioscience information generated in these countries available to the international research community world-wide." The site offers a range of journals, with full text access. Areas include zoology, health, agriculture, and nutrition. There aren't a lot of journals so the site is manageable. Good source if you are a scientist seeking data/information from areas other than the west.

Medscape is a useful resource for keeping up to date with a range of developments across the medical and health related fields

What is also important, that information from it could be legally downloaded and used later for reference and training even without internet access. This is used for training health care professionals in some African countries. Users can also upload their own medical images to share with colleagues

Scientific journals are surely important. They provide the most effective means for disseminating and archiving scientific results, and so are a key part of an enterprise on which our health, security, and prosperity ultimately depend. Publications are used by universities, funding agencies, and others as a primary measure of research productivity and impact. They play a decisive role in hiring, promotion, and salary decisions, and in the ranking of departments, institutions, even nations. With big rewards tied to publication, it is not surprising that some people engage in unethical behavior, abuse, and downright fraud.

Story on Public WiFi We took a hacker to a café and, in 20 minutes, he knew where everyone else was born, what schools they attended, and the last five things they googled. By Maurits Martijn, from De Correspondent Translated from Dutch by Jona Meijers Illustrations by Kristina Collantes

Traditional Healers Organization For Africa: " Biopiracy and Indigenous Traditional Medicine Knowledge The blatant plunder of indigenous knowledge and genetic resources in South Africa continues unhindered and without State monitoring. Since 1997, We have been monitoring private and public enterprises (or their intermediaries) who are actively collecting, sampling and acquiring traditional knowledge for the development of pharmaceutical products. What concerns us is that international organizations are entering South Africa to carry out this research. Not even the World Health Organization are free of scrutiny in this regard. "Biopiracy" refers to the use of intellectual property laws (patents, plant breeders' rights) to gain exclusive monopoly control over genetic resources that are based on the knowledge and innovation of indigenous peoples. Biopiracy and bioprospecting don't just happen in the field ; biopiracy is even more likely to take place in the laboratories of industry and academia, and in patent offices in the cities not even in South Africa."

Shule.Info is a project that puts data about Tanzanian schools online, providing information for the overall country, regions, and individual schools. The website is also in both English and Swahili, the language of the majority of Tanzanians. This is a great attempt at making this open data accessible and understandable to the people to who need it. "We all know that education in Tanzania is in a state of crisis. Massive failure rates. Not enough teachers. Not enough books. Poor teaching. And many more problems. So what do you do if you are a parent, brother or sister and want to find a good school? What if you are a council or national government leader and want to track progress? Right now it is very difficult to do so, because data is not easily available. And when you can access data, it is very difficult to understand and use. Open data is in fact relevant to all of us in making beter decisions. It is not just a concept for technical experts. If we knew which medicines were available in our nearest health centres we would save ourselves wasted trips. If we had live traffic updates we could better plan our travel. And if we had data on school performance we would have the chance to make better decisions about our children's education and potentially shape the course of their future differently."