Science and Engineering Labor Force

[Excerpt] Like most developed economies, the United States increasingly depends on a technically skilled workforce, including scientists and engineers. Workers for whom knowledge and skill in S&E are central to their jobs have an effect on the economy and the wider society that is disproportionate to their numbers: they contribute to research and development, increased knowledge, technological innovation, and economic growth. Moreover, the knowledge and skills associated with science and engineering have diffused across occupations and become more important in jobs that are not traditionally associated with S&E

Abstracts of the Reproduction section presented during the 8th World Rabbit Congress, Puebla, Mexico 7-10. 2004

(2005). Abstracts of the Reproduction section presented during the 8th World Rabbit Congress, Puebla, Mexico 7-10. 2004. World Rabbit Science. 13. doi:10.4995/wrs.2005.512SWORD1

OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS: WHAT FACULTY AUTHORS CAN DO TO ENSURE OPEN ACCESS TO THEIR WORK THROUGH THEIR INSTITUTION

The Internet has brought unparalleled opportunities for expanding availability of research by bringing down economic and physical barriers to sharing. The digitally networked environment promises to democratize access, carry knowledge beyond traditional research niches, accelerate discovery, encourage new and interdisciplinary approaches to ever more complex research challenges, and enable new computational research strategies. However, despite these opportunities for increasing access to knowledge, the prices of scholarly journals have risen sharply over the past two decades, often forcing libraries to cancel subscriptions. Today even the wealthiest institutions cannot afford to sustain all of the journals needed by their faculties and students. To take advantage of the opportunities created by the Internet and to further their mission of creating, preserving, and disseminating knowledge, many academic institutions are taking steps to capture the benefits of more open research sharing. Colleges and universities have built digital repositories to preserve and distribute faculty scholarly articles and other research outputs. Many individual authors have taken steps to retain the rights they need, under copyright law, to allow their work to be made freely available on the Internet and in their institutionâ s repository. And, faculties at some institutions have adopted resolutions endorsing more open access to scholarly articles. Most recently, on February 12, 2008, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at Harvard University took a landmark step. The faculty voted to adopt a policy requiring that faculty authors send an electronic copy of their scholarly articles to the universityâ s digital repository and that faculty authors automatically grant copyright permission to the university to archive and to distribute these articles unless a faculty member has waived the policy for a particular article. Essentially, the faculty voted to make open access to the results of their published journal articles the default policy for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University. As of March 2008, a proposal is also under consideration in the University of California system by which faculty authors would commit routinely to grant copyright permission to the university to make copies of the facultyâ s scholarly work openly accessible over the Internet. Inspired by the example set by the Harvard faculty, this White Paper is addressed to the faculty and administrators of academic institutions who support equitable access to scholarly research and knowledge, and who believe that the institution can play an important role as steward of the scholarly literature produced by its faculty. This paper discusses both the motivation and the process for establishing a binding institutional policy that automatically grants a copyright license from each faculty member to permit deposit of his or her peer-reviewed scholarly articles in institutional repositories, from which the works become available for others to read and cite

The Australian Research Quality Framework: A live experiment in capturing the social, economic, environmental, and cultural returns of publicly funded research

Copyright @ 2008 Wiley Periodicals Inc. This is the accepted version of the following article: Donovan, C. (2008), The Australian Research Quality Framework: A live experiment in capturing the social, economic, environmental, and cultural returns of publicly funded research. New Directions for Evaluation, 2008: 47–60, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ev.260/abstract.The author regards development of Australia's ill-fated Research Quality Framework (RQF) as a “live experiment” in determining the most appropriate approach to evaluating the extra-academic returns, or “impact,” of a nation's publicly funded research. The RQF was at the forefront of an international movement toward richer qualitative, contextual approaches that aimed to gauge the wider economic, social, environmental, and cultural benefits of research. Its construction and implementation sent mixed messages and created confusion about what impact is, and how it is best measured, to the extent that this bold live experiment did not come to fruition

The need for ‘Diamond Engagement’ around open access to high quality research output

This paper advocates for a co-ordinated cultural shift in their engagement with access to resources in order to make peer-reviewed articles available to a wider audience. This Paper addresses two audiences: scientists, especially those who have been traditionally more resistant to the OA approach, and policy makers. The Scientific Committee is well aware of the difficulties that some research communities face in engaging with the OA approach and would like to offer a way forward to address the current status quo. Social scientists in particular have been struggling with the discussion on OA, given the length of time that the current quality standards and good practice for publication took to set up. The community of researchers perceives that these standards are now guarded by the peer-reviewed ranked journals which do not offer OA for either articles or books, a situation that is certain to persist for some time.   The other important aspect is that payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) to journals for OA publication is often unaffordable given the limited resources available to the social sciences disciplines. In this context, this paper illustrates how the deposition of articles in public repositories can be beneficial to the research community. At the same time, this Paper encourages policy makers to better invest in the harmonisation of research information metadata standards across Europe using existing public infrastructures, and to ensure good quality of records, interoperability and discoverability. It also links the discussion of OA with an issue that is crucial in both research and policy agendas: demonstration of the impact of publicly-funded research

Theoretical Study of Physisorption of Nucleobases on Boron Nitride Nanotubes: A New Class of Hybrid Nano-Bio Materials

We investigate the adsorption of the nucleic acid bases, adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), thymine (T) and uracil (U) on the outer wall of a high curvature semiconducting single-walled boron nitride nanotube (BNNT) by first principles density functional theory calculations. The calculated binding energy shows the order: G>A\approxC\approxT\approxU implying that the interaction strength of the (high-curvature) BNNT with the nucleobases, G being an exception, is nearly the same. A higher binding energy for the G-BNNT conjugate appears to result from a stronger hybridization of the molecular orbitals of G and BNNT, since the charge transfer involved in the physisorption process is insignificant. A smaller energy gap predicted for the G-BNNT conjugate relative to that of the pristine BNNT may be useful in application of this class of biofunctional materials to the design of the next generation sensing devices.Comment: 17 pages 6 figure

Peak minerals: mapping sustainability issues at local and national scales

Peak minerals adopts the Hubbert metaphor for peak oil to highlight issues associated with initial mining of `cheaper, more accessible and higher quality ores pre-peak, to `lower grade, more remote, complex and expensive ores post-peak. In doing so, it prompts focus on the `services provided by the resource in-use as well as the transition strategy to supply those services following the decline of production post-peak. This paper applies the peak minerals metaphor as a basis for examining the social and environmental implications pre- and post-peak production across spatial scales. Using document review and stakeholder analysis from a National Peak Minerals Forum held in Australia, social and environmental impacts are mapped at local and national scales. This innovative mapping found that currently, consideration is given to local social and environmental issues and global economic issues, however, triple bottom line issues at the national scale are currently overlooked. As minerals resources belong to the people of a nation, this finding will inform future approaches to transition strategies seeking to maximise long term value for the use of the resources