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The advent of the World Wide Web has led to an explosion in the number of diverse resources available to neuroscientists. Despite the availability of powerful search engines, locating these diverse resources has become increasingly difficult and time consuming. The NIF project utilizes both advanced machine-based search technologies and old-fashioned human legwork to provide access to neuroscience-relevant resources on the Web. Resources include research materials, Web pages, software tools, data sets, literature and general information. The NIF has developed technologies that allow a user to search across these different types of resources, all from a single interface. A unique feature of the NIF is the ability to issue direct queries against multiple databases simultaneously, retrieving content that is largely hidden from traditional search engines. A second unique feature is an extensive vocabulary covering major neuroscience domains for describing and searching these resources. The NIF takes advantage of advances in knowledge engineering to broaden and refine searches based on related concepts. The NIF beta test site was developed to gain feedback on the NIF search interface and content. Users will be asked to search the NIF, explore the vocabularies, and answer a questionnaire about their experience.

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.

SWAN (Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine) is a Web-based collaborative program that aims to organize and annotate scientific knowledge about Alzheimer disease (AD) and other neurodegenerative disorders. Its goal is to facilitate the formation, development and testing of hypotheses about the disease. The ultimate goal of this project is to create tools and resources to manage the evolving universe of data and information about AD in such a way that researchers can easily comprehend their larger context ("what hypothesis does this support or contradict?"), compare and contrast hypotheses ("where do these two hypotheses agree and disagree?"), identify unanswered questions and synthesize concepts and data into ever more comprehensive and useful hypotheses and treatment targets for this disease. The SWAN project is designed to allow the community of AD researchers to author, curate and connect a diversity of data and ideas about AD via secure personal and public SWAN workspaces, using the emerging Semantic Web paradigm for deep interconnection of data, information and knowledge. We are initially focusing on developing a fully public Web resource deployed as part of the Alzheimer Research Forum web site (www.alzforum.org). After the public resource has been launched, we will also develop secure personal workspaces (MySWAN) and semi-private lab workspaces (LabSWAN). An essential component of this project is development of an initial, core knowledge base within SWAN, which will provide immediate value to researchers at the time of deployment. This is a critically important part of our strategy to ensure that the SWAN system gains wide adoption and active participation by the AD research community. As part of our development strategy, we are also recruiting a "beta test" community of AD researchers to enter their own hypotheses, add commentaries and citations, and provide feedback on the technology and content. SWAN is being developed by a collaborative team from

Sixty years of study have made Escherichia coli K-12 the most deeply understood organism at the molecular level. Much of what we know about cellular processes can be traced to fundamental discoveries in E. coli. In spite of its great importance as a model organism, information about E. coli is distributed among many online resources. EcoliHub uses web services that are being developed to make seamless bidirectional connections between E. coli resources, thereby enabling the full use of existing knowledge and supporting cutting-edge research into the molecular basis of life. Read More EcoliHub is being developed to serve the user community. Users can help teach us what is desirable in future releases by taking our User Survey.

UCSF Chimera is a highly extensible program for interactive visualization and analysis of molecular structures and related data, including density maps, supramolecular assemblies, sequence alignments, docking results, trajectories, and conformational ensembles. High-quality images and animations can be generated. Chimera includes complete documentation and several tutorials, and can be downloaded free of charge for academic, government, non-profit, and personal use. Chimera is developed by the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics and funded by the NIH National Center for Research Resources (grant P41-RR01081).

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.

The Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) is a dynamic inventory of web-based neurosciences data, resources, and tools that scientists and students can access via any computer connected to the Internet. An initiative of the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, the NIF will advance neuroscience research by enabling discovery and access to public research data and tools worldwide through an open source, networked environment.

Through its resource registry and concept based query system, NIF enhances neuroscience research by enabling discovery and access to research data and tools worldwide.

The presentation provides an overview of some of the challenges the publishers face moving forward, how they are responding to it, how InChI is an enabling technology, how quality is important.

With the following three steps, you can set up a Disco cluster in the Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud. This will cost you a few dollars (or more, depending on your needs) but requires no resources on your side besides a single machine that you use to setup the cluster. In this setup Disco master and nodes run on EC2. Your Disco client can run either on the master node on EC2 or on a local machine.

In the page on Thoughs on institutional OER contributions I argue that (among other things) having a good export of material from shared resources (like the OER Toolkit or wikieducator) is important for getting institutions to contribute. How is this requirement met by the platform used for the OER Toolkit and wikieducator?

The establishment of open access literature makes it possible for knowledge to be extracted from scholarly articles and included in other resources. BioLit aims to extract database identifiers and rich meta-data from open access articles in the life sciences and integrate that information with existing biological databases. We have begun prototyping this effort using a clone of the RCSB Protein Data Bank, a database of macromolecular structures.

PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 18 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to 1948. PubMed includes links to full text articles and other related resources.

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.

The world's largest and best Life Science Forum and Scientist's Discusion group