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Note – we’re closed this Sunday, May 26th and Monday, May 27th (the blog will also be on hiatus on Monday) – happy Memorial Day!

Hashtags of the Week (HOTW): Stem Cells, Cloning and Publishing, Oh My! (Week of May 20, 2013)

I’m sure most of our readers know that a groundbreaking article was published on May 15th regarding patient specific stem cell cloning. What has come to light since then about the publishing process for the article has been slightly disturbing. First, I looked at the original announcements and information about stem cell research, then I went on to explore issues surrounding science communication and scholarly publishing. It all started (as far as I could tell) with this announcement:

Human Embryonic Stem Cells Derived by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer! Paper from Shoukhrat Mitalipov et. al @ ow.ly/l3I0d

— Cell at CellPress (@CellCellPress) May 15, 2013

This immediately lead to ethical and policy questions being raised. Many discussions were found on the following hashtags #bioethics, #stemcell, #stemcells, and #cloning.

Even SCNT’s need caffeine to function correctly MT @ananyo: Huge RT @naturenews: Human stem cells created by cloning dlvr.it/3N7njP

— David Steinberg (@DavidASteinberg) May 15, 2013

@naturenews @cellcellpress more interesting coverage of the Mitalipov paper bit.ly/12AVmbp bit.ly/16zQglc

— Molecular Cell (@MolecularCell) May 17, 2013

Reporters are having trouble with the scientific, legal, and ethical aspects of this week’s #cloning news: nationalreview.com/corner/348651/…

— TheNewAtlantis.com (@tnajournal) May 17, 2013

Human cloning is finally here, and it is going to spark a political conflagration. ow.ly/ldieW #cloning #bioethics

— Discovery Institute (@DiscoveryCSC) May 20, 2013

What we found out this week was that the paper was pushed through the publication process so quickly that some (minor) mistakes were found through post-publication peer review including a manipulated image. These conversations are still unfolding.

Stem-cell cloner acknowledges honest errors in groundbreaking paper nature.com/news/stem-cell… #Bioethics #HCSM

— Berman Institute(@bermaninstitute) May 23, 2013

Surprising carelessness from authors, publishers in Cell stem-cell cloning paper. However, findings still seem valid. dlvr.it/3Q2DsP

— Alex Goglia (@alexgoglia) May 23, 2013

.@wilbanks Time for someone to start scholarlyca .com: “Scholarly Closed Access — critical analysis of scholarly closed-access publishing”

— Mike Taylor (@MikeTaylor) May 23, 2013

I mean, we all hate the sloooooow publishing turnaround times, but three days is…too far in the other direction.

— Sci Curious (@scicurious) May 23, 2013

I don’t blame the authors of the #stemcell paper for the rushed pub–who wouldn’t say “hey, great!” to a sub 3 week turnaround on a paper??!

— Andy Kass (@DrAndyKass) May 23, 2013

For everyone watching for errors in the Cell stem cell paper – @naturenews now has the response from the authors nature.com/news/stem-cell…

— Richard Van Noorden (@Richvn) May 23, 2013

@pubpeer Thanks! Let me know if you hear anything else. @cellcellpress is not talking (that’s usually how they roll).

— nprGlobalHealth (@nprGlobalHealth) May 23, 2013

“Science me up” – essential advice from @edyong209 for scientists asked to comment on a paper:phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/22/a-g… #COMPASSmtg #scicomm

— LizNeeley (@LizNeeley) May 22, 2013

Cloning paper kerfuffle highlights hazards of rushed publication and merits of post-pub peer review. nature.com/news/stem-cell… @naturenews

— Kristen Delevich (@K_dele) May 23, 2013

This has lent some steam to the conversations that were already focused on the publishing process and its role in research, faculty status, and science communication.

Are We In a Rut? Explaining the Increasing Homogenization of Scholarly and Scientific Publishing wp.me/pcvbl-8qC

— Scholarly Kitchen (@scholarlykitchn) May 16, 2013

Researchers and Scientific Groups Make New Push Against Impact Factors shar.es/ZqzLk via @chronicle #scholarlypublishing #metrics

— Garrett Eastman (@notinmy) May 16, 2013

sciencemag.org/content/340/61… This Science editorial on Impact Factors is a must-read for my scientist friends

— David Shiffman (@WhySharksMatter) May 23, 2013

RT @shanakimball Follow #ciccli13 for “Emerging Options for Scholarly Publishing” conference cic.net/calendar/confe…

— lorcan dempsey (@lorcanD) May 22, 2013

Michael Eisen: Apotheosis of cynicism and deceit from scholarly publishers ow.ly/libR1 #openaccess

— Richard Poynder (@RickyPo) May 22, 2013

My latest: Why stories make a good vehicle for science communication davenussbaum.com/narrative-tran…

— Dave Nussbaum (@davenuss79) May 21, 2013

One-stop Health Sciences Funding Portal – Now in Beta!

At the University of Michigan we’re pretty blessed to have access to the plethora of resources our university has – but navigating those resources when they’re managed by a variety of different schools and departments can be challenging. In an effort to address that challenge, your liaison librarians have developed a research guide that aims to consolidate the disparate resources at your disposal: the Health Sciences Grant Information Portal, or HS-GIP. The guide takes you through the steps of the funding cycle:

1. Finding funding sources
2. Grant writing
3. Post-award processing

This post will walk you through a couple of the guide’s key features, then leave you to explore and give us your feedback if you so desire!

The main page lets you navigate – via the gold tabs – to funding resources for students, health-sciences specific funding (more on that below) and general funding databases that let you search across disciplines & funding types:

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That Health Sciences Specific Funding tab I mentioned earlier leads you to an area that encompasses information on specific government agencies, including NIH, NSF, and the DoD:

I hope you’ll forgive me for including a plug for my 2nd year project as a ULA – but you can also find a link to the wonderful foundations.umich.edu portal (U Mich log-in required) – which is geared toward faculty looking for foundation funding on the main page:

Is there anything you’d like to see on the Health Sciences Grant Information Portal, or have any other suggestions? Send us an email at: thlgrantsportal@umich.edu

Rewarding Open Access – Nominations for the Accelerating Science Award Program

A new award, with major sponsorship from Google, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the Wellcome Trust, seeks to reward pioneers for the social good byawarding $30,000 to three people who have “applied scientific research published through open access” – in ANY field – for the benefit of society.

The official award site is here, and the application period closes June 15th, 2013 – so hop to it!

Nominees should be people and/or teams that have:

• Used
• Applied
• or remixed scientific research published through open access.

Examples of nominees (so far) include:

A bioinformatics team repurposes existing source codes used for searching genomic data associated with individual cancer tumors to create a new open source algorithm and web tool that can search multiple tumor types simultaneously, enabling faster and more comprehensive searches by oncologists for use in clinical treatment of cancer patients.

and

A patient advocate creates a new web community for individuals with a rare genetic disorder and their families; this website curates existing and newly available open access research about causes and treatment protocols, and offers interpretative science articles and a user forum to help nonscientist readers better understand the science presented.

Some rules*:

• Teams are eligible
• Self-nominations are totally kosher

Nomination forms are here, and there is an award FAQ as well.

*NOT the full suite of rules – see the entire set of guidelines here.

Follow the conversation at #SciASAP.

The award is also supported by:

Mendeley + Elsevier – A Marriage Made in Bibliographic Heaven?

Chances are that by now you’ve heard about Mendeley‘s sale to Elsevier. There had been rumors circulating for some time about the sale, but I heard when they made it official in April – naturally, from a well-informed classmate who heard via Twitter (kudos to @emilyrnlds for the tip).

I thought about posting this in the immediate days after the announcement, but frankly I wanted to see how things would shake out – and naturally, the internet didn’t disappoint.

Twitter users rushed for a pun-filled spin on the issue with #mendelsevier and #mendelete (again, @emilyrnlds led me to those hashtags). But I was curious about some reactions more in-depth than 140 characters, so here’s a round up of what I found:

• The announcement blog post from Mendeley
• Mendeley’s blog post announcing more account storage
• Elsevier’s blog announcement and official press release
• TechCrunch’s article confirming rumors of the sale
• Scholarly Kitchen’s take
• The New Yorker weighs in with a hilarious title
• David Weinberger’s (from Harvard’s Berkman Center & director of Harvard Library Innovation Lab) blog post
• Microsoft Research’s Danah Boyd’s missive on why she’s now deleting Mendeley
• Mendeley’s cofounder, Victor Henning, answers questions cropping up via social media

TL;DR: What does it mean for me?

• If you’ve got an individual Mendeley account, it’ll still be free
• You’ll get more (free) storage – 2GB for individual accounts, 5GB for premium and institutional accounts
• Mendeley will develop an Android app soon to complement it’s iOS usage
• The API will remain open
• Do you care about open access/data? That’s not going to fit into a bullet point – so read on:

I anticipated some of the ire from the Mendeley user community due to the dichotomy between Mendeley’s open “hey come look at what your peer group is reading! Collaborate! Innovate!” culture and Elsevier’s rather…controversial business practices; the New Yorker writes Elsevier is:

infamous for restricting the flow of scientific information so it can sell research papers for as much as fifty dollars a piece, generating profit margins of thirty-six per cent and netting the company billions of dollars in revenue annually. The company has fought legislation designed to open up academic research, offered scholars money to file positive reviews, sued libraries for oversharing, and allegedly published fake journals on behalf of the pharmaceuticals industry.

And indeed this seems to fuel the bulk of the user complaints. As part of his response (linked above), David Weinberger writes:

The idea of my reading behaviors adding economic value to a company making huge profits by locking scholarship behind increasingly expensive paywalls is, in a word, repugnant.

And here is where the Scholarly Kitchen blog shines as a beacon of well-balanced online authorship by pointing out the concerns and how, despite the press releases and blog posts and social media chats from Mendelsevier, they avoid

“the question about whether users have the right to openly share copyrighted or licensed content via Mendeley even if they or their institution subscribe (or if there is a CC-BY-NC license associated with the work)…one that ties into the legal risks around this deal and the longevity of Mendeley’s central premise of PDF sharing now that it’s owned by Elsevier.”

Yet, as Kent Anderson (contributing author to Scholarly Kitchen and CEO/publisher of the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery) points out,

“in the long run, it’s likely better for publishers to see [article usage statistics] under the roof of a company with incentive for respecting copyright, rather than an independent wildcard with no such ties…[since] it’s worth noting that publishers tend to take services at face value, as Connotea and CiteULike were used by many platforms across journals, despite being owned by Nature Publishing Group and supported by Springer, respectively.”

Recognizing that this may not be the most popular opinion, I would like to be cautiously optimistic. I think there could possibly be benefits by having a dedicated system backed by a well-funded company to measure the article-level metrics – which is really where I think the next impact factor is going to come from (Jason Priem, a PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill will convince you of this in one presentation or less). I had the pleasure of hearing Jason speak at the Medical Library Association conference earlier this month, and naturally in the question portion someone asked about Mendelsevier. For now, I’m sticking with his response (which I won’t quote as I’m paraphrasing and can’t recall the exact wording, but it was something along the lines of): Both companies have said they will preserve Mendeley’s commitment to openness, and that’s what I’ll stick to until I see otherwise.

A Doctor’s View of Medical Education, Medical Practice, and the Underserved

From KevinMD.com:

Medical education

Many people believe that there is, or soon will be, a physician shortage. There are nearly 1 million physicians scattered across America representing a ratio of 319 doctors per 100,000 Americans. According to estimates, the AAMC states that there are 13,700 too few physicians for our communities. In contrast to that, the GAO implies that adequate access exists for 97% of Medicare patients. So is there really a physician shortage? I suppose that depends on who you ask [...]

Medical practice

Why spend over 7 years training someone to fill that void (4 years of medical school and at least 3 years of residency training) when other clinicians can be trained in less time? Nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) take a fraction of the time to train relative to physicians and produce similar outcomes in certain studies [...]

The underserved

One of the major elements impacting the care of the underserved will be the implementation of the Medicaid expansion in 2014. Originally, the Affordable Care Act would have used Medicaid as a vehicle to provide health insurance coverage to approximately 16 or 17 million Americans under 138% of the federal poverty level [...]

Read the full post here:  Reflections on medical education, medical practice and the underserved

Hashtags of the Week (HOTW): National Women’s Health Week and Prophylactic Mastectomies (Week of May 13, 2013)

While I was preparing last week’s post, I saw some tweets about National Women’s Health Week this week. I thought that was quite appropriate considering the week started with Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day itself was full of trials and triumphs as noted in these tweets:

THIS RT @archivesnext: Why isn’t New Orleans Mother’s Day parade shooting a ‘national tragedy’?bit.ly/YMbVBO via @twttimes

— Ayla Stein (@TheStacksCat) May 16, 2013

MT @umhealthsystem: Marie Janus, home for Mother’s Day after becoming our 2000th liver transplant recipient: umhealth.me/10tFx3p

— UniversityofMichigan (@umich) May 13, 2013

From there, I looked to #NationalWomensHealthWeek and #NWHW to find the most interesting tweets about Women’s Health.

Happy National Women’s Health Week! at.wh.gov/l3Q5H, twitter.com/whitehouse/sta…

— The White House (@whitehouse) May 15, 2013

@alzheimers_nih Ah, yes, asking for help! Sometimes it seems stressful, but is esp important for caregivers! womenshealth.gov/publications/o… #NWHW

— womenshealth.gov (@womenshealth) May 16, 2013

RT @aauw: Remember when a Harvard doctor suggested that educating women would cause infertility? flip.it/q9jmS #NWHW

— Melissa Harris-Perry (@MHarrisPerry) May 14, 2013

Initiative on #Diabetes & Women’s Health: working on quality of care for women at risk for gestational diabetes. go.usa.gov/T7rx

— CDCChronic (@CDCChronic) May 16, 2013

Ladies, remember to take care of your health, nutrition and well being!! #NationalWomensHealthWeek #NWHW twitter.com/AllenbyDerm/st…

— Allenby Dermatology (@AllenbyDerm) May 16, 2013

Exciting developments in helping preserve chemo patients’ fertility #NationalWomensHealthWeekvia @naturenews nature.com/news/drug-save…

— Ovuline (@ovuline) May 16, 2013

Take control of your health this #NationalWomensHealthWeek “Why don’t patients behave more like consumers?” tedmed.com/talks/show?id=… #TEDMED

— APTA Women’s Health (@womens_PT) May 13, 2013

Wondering how the health care law improves women’s health? #NationalWomensHealthWeek INFOGRAPHIC (via @womenshealth) twitter.com/PPSNE/status/3…

— PlannedParenthoodSNE (@PPSNE) May 15, 2013

I don’t know if Angelina Jolie decided to hold her press conference because it was National Women’s Health Week, or because she just felt is was the right time, but the revelation of her prophylactic double mastectomy certainly had people talking about women’s health issues. It started with an outpouring of support and well wishes for Jolie and evolved to include conversations surrounding Supreme Court cases, economic and healthcare realities, and patent law. You can follow these conversations on #brca and #breastcancer.

Angelina Jolie: “I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.” nyti.ms/10wszSl

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 14, 2013

The battle over BRCA1: @cbsandrew on the court case looming behind Angelina Jolie’s op-ed theatln.tc/13xsovp

— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) May 15, 2013

Some doctors worried that Angelina Jolie’s disclosure could be misinterpreted by other women nyti.ms/10oViww

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 15, 2013

#SciAmBlogs on Jolie and breast cancer today: bit.ly/140ppLh and bit.ly/140qxyy and bit.ly/13iHy4f (so far)

— Bora Zivkovic (@BoraZ) May 15, 2013

Learn more about #BRCA 1 & 2 mutations: We’ve extended free streaming of IN THE FAMILY until 5/26 to.pbs.org/16XKlDR @pbs

— POV (@povdocs) May 16, 2013

#myriad‘s breast cancer gene test now costs $4000 – bit.ly/YV7YNj many people will die because of this outrageous patent #brca

— Glyn Moody (@glynmoody) May 15, 2013

Two of my relatives (maternal grandmother & aunt) have had breast cancer. So my DNA might be violating Myriad’s patent as we speak. #BRCA

— Katie Mack (@AstroKatie) May 14, 2013

Finally, I came across a reference to #WD2013 which is the annual Women Deliver conference. This global conference is being held in Kuala Lumpur May 28-30, 2013. While you may not be able to attend in person, they will have online streaming content. The conference focuses on the “health and empowerment of girls and women” through political and economic engagement, particularly as it relates to maternal and newborn health and wellness.

When a mother dies, her kids are 10x more likely to die w/in 2 yrs of her death. We’re working to change this bit.ly/13xB8ld #WD2013

— Jhpiego (@Jhpiego) May 16, 2013

Interested in #WD2013 but can’t get to Malaysia? Never fear! Watch online w/ @womendeliver‘s live webcasts. Schedule: ow.ly/l4cef

— GirlsGlobe (@GirlsGlobe) May 16, 2013