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ccLearn is always on the look out for helpful and informative media championing the strengths of open educational resources. If you know of a good OER resource, helpful article, or interesting video, please let us know and we will examine it for inclusion. This page is constantly being updated, so be sure to come back and check out the latest information on open education.

The AAAS Science and Human Rights Coalition is a network of scientific organizations that recognizes a role for science and scientists in efforts to realize human rights. Composed of scientific associations, societies and academies, as well as individual scientists, the Coalition aims to facilitate communication and partnerships on human rights within and across scientific communities, and between these and human rights communities. The Coalition's programs are being carried out by the following five working groups: 1. Welfare of Scientists 2. Science Ethics and Human Rights 3. Service to the Scientific Community 4. Service to the Human Rights Community 5. Education and Information Resources The Coalition is also pursuing a joint initiative to realize the human right to "the benefits of scientific progress" (Article 15, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights).

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium of leading biologists, clinicians, informaticians, and ontologists who develop innovative technology and methods allowing scientists to create, disseminate, and manage biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. Our visionis that all biomedical knowledge and data are disseminated on the Internet using principled ontologies, such that they are semantically interoperable and useful for improving biomedical science and clinical care. Our resources include the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) library, the Open Biomedical Data (OBD) repositories, and tools for accessing and using this information in research. The Center collaborates with biomedical researchers conducting Driving Biological Projects to enable outside research and stimulate technology development in the Center. The Center undertakes outreach and educational activities (Biomedical Informatics Program) to train future researchers to use biomedical ontologies and related tools with the goal of enhancing scientific discovery.

his meeting was about "Making the Web Work for Science and the Impact of e-Science and the Cyberinfrastructure." I provided an overview of how access to information has changed over the past 20 years for me. I talked about the challenges for publishers serving the chemistry community and how their business models are being challenged and how I empathize with the struggle to figure out how to deal with it. I talked about quality and how care must be taken when using information online. We are ALL challenged with errors - whether you consider PubChem, ChemSpider, Wikipedia or any of the other online databases they all have errors - how do you find them? Some of them are obvious and I pointed to obvious examples in the talk. I hoped to educate the attendees in regards to the value of InChI which, while not a perfect fit yet, is a great start to structure-based communication of chemistry. I publicly blessed the efforts of publishers such as the RSC and Nature Publishing group for the efforts they are making to support InChI and improve the quality of document presentation online. I blessed CAS as a treasure trove of information and the gold standard of curated chemistry. We need them all to be successful for the sake of our science. The challenge is how to fit into the ongoing proliferation of free access to information without modifying the business models.