Adapting the Library Repository to Accommodate Research Data, Publications, and Partnering with Researchers

Brown University Library originally created the Brown Digital Repository (BDR) in 2011 to serve the digital content storage and dissemination needs of its Special Collections and Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS). Since then, the BDR has evolved to serve a broader group of stakeholders, including the science librarians, who deposit researchers’ data along with the supplementary materials underlying their publications, collections of data to comply with a grant-funder’s requirements for data sharing, and faculty publications. Some university library systems have created separate repositories for data, such as the Universities of Michigan and Minnesota. However, for libraries at smaller institutions, having a separate system for images, publications, and data may not be the most-feasible or affordable short-term solution. Over the last year, Brown’s science librarians and developers have been planning to make enhancements and changes to the BDR to improve its ingest, dissemination, and overall capabilities for preserving the long-term access of research data as well as make the necessary adaptations to the way that the BDR collects faculty publications, with the aim of it being a resource to help researchers with retaining their final approved manuscripts and complying with their funders’ public access policies. These shifts, from a focus on ingesting and displaying images to a focus on data and publications have exposed many issues and challenges that librarians considering adapting their existing repositories to accommodate data and public access mandates should hear. At the same time, the Library has been working with the Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics to integrate its science librarians and repository infrastructure into grant-funded projects, such as an NLM Administrative Supplement for Informationist Services. In the second half of the session, Dr. Neil Sarkar, the Director of the Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics, and Principal Investigator on the NLM Administrative Supplement, will provide a keynote address, which will cover: (1) faculty perspectives academic libraries should have in mind while adapting their repositories for tracking and making available their faculty’s scholarly output; (2) ways libraries can develop infrastructure to partner with their faculty on research projects and grant-funded initiatives, such as clinical and translational science; (3) ways that libraries could integrate their repositories into existing systems for recording scholarly output, such as My NCBI’s My Bibliography as well as systems for displaying researcher and scholarship ontologies such as VIVO; and (4) ways that libraries can adapt their repositories to provide meaningful analytics and metrics for measuring the impact of their researcher communities

Prioritizing research challenges and funding for allergy and asthma and the need for translational research-The European Strategic Forum on Allergic Diseases

The European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI) organized the first European Strategic Forum on Allergic Diseases and Asthma. The main aim was to bring together all relevant stakeholders and decision-makers in the field of allergy, asthma and clinical Immunology around an open debate on contemporary challenges and potential solutions for the next decade. The Strategic Forum was an upscaling of the EAACI White Paper aiming to integrate the Academy's output with the perspective offered by EAACI's partners. This collaboration is fundamental for adapting and integrating allergy and asthma care into the context of real-world problems. The Strategic Forum on Allergic Diseases brought together all partners who have the drive and the influence to make positive change: national and international societies, patients' organizations, regulatory bodies and industry representatives. An open debate with a special focus on drug development and biomedical engineering, big data and information technology and allergic diseases and asthma in the context of environmental health concluded that connecting science with the transformation of care and a joint agreement between all partners on priorities and needs are essential to ensure a better management of allergic diseases and asthma in the advent of precision medicine together with global access to innovative and affordable diagnostics and therapeutics.Peer reviewe

Strategies for Improving the Diversity of the Health Professions

Evaluates programs and strategies that were designed to increase the number of underrepresented African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos in the health professions in California. Includes recommendations

Prevention is a solution: building the HIVe

This Special Issue of Digital Culture and Education (DCE), Building the HIVe, offers relevant and applicable examples of digital technologies being leveraged, positioned and practiced towards community-based and led HIV prevention as a solution in a digital era. The contributors to this Special Issue, frontline workers, activists, researchers and educators alike, have taken risks as they have explored innovative prevention approaches with and through digital technologies, and documented and analysed their pedagogical innovations in different cultural contexts. Importantly this Special Issue also includes the critical voices and leadership of individuals living with HIV as designers of prevention as a solution. Their timely insights, advice and understandings of HIV prevention as a solution merit close scrutiny as evidence of resourceful, imaginative and critical endeavour; they are offered to share successful interventions and stimulate further discussion

The medical science DMZ: a network design pattern for data-intensive medical science

Abstract: Objective We describe a detailed solution for maintaining high-capacity, data-intensive network flows (eg, 10, 40, 100 Gbps+) in a scientific, medical context while still adhering to security and privacy laws and regulations. Materials and Methods High-end networking, packet-filter firewalls, network intrusion-detection systems. Results We describe a “Medical Science DMZ” concept as an option for secure, high-volume transport of large, sensitive datasets between research institutions over national research networks, and give 3 detailed descriptions of implemented Medical Science DMZs. Discussion The exponentially increasing amounts of “omics” data, high-quality imaging, and other rapidly growing clinical datasets have resulted in the rise of biomedical research “Big Data.” The storage, analysis, and network resources required to process these data and integrate them into patient diagnoses and treatments have grown to scales that strain the capabilities of academic health centers. Some data are not generated locally and cannot be sustained locally, and shared data repositories such as those provided by the National Library of Medicine, the National Cancer Institute, and international partners such as the European Bioinformatics Institute are rapidly growing. The ability to store and compute using these data must therefore be addressed by a combination of local, national, and industry resources that exchange large datasets. Maintaining data-intensive flows that comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other regulations presents a new challenge for biomedical research. We describe a strategy that marries performance and security by borrowing from and redefining the concept of a Science DMZ, a framework that is used in physical sciences and engineering research to manage high-capacity data flows. Conclusion By implementing a Medical Science DMZ architecture, biomedical researchers can leverage the scale provided by high-performance computer and cloud storage facilities and national high-speed research networks while preserving privacy and meeting regulatory requirements

The Role of the Private Sector in Training the Next Generation of Biomedical Scientists

Summarizes the proceedings of a conference to address the unique contribution that private funders can make in ensuring that appropriate and adequate training programs are available for basic and clinical research. Offers conclusions and recommendations

Cancer Informatics for Cancer Centers (CI4CC): Building a Community Focused on Sharing Ideas and Best Practices to Improve Cancer Care and Patient Outcomes.

Cancer Informatics for Cancer Centers (CI4CC) is a grassroots, nonprofit 501c3 organization intended to provide a focused national forum for engagement of senior cancer informatics leaders, primarily aimed at academic cancer centers anywhere in the world but with a special emphasis on the 70 National Cancer Institute-funded cancer centers. Although each of the participating cancer centers is structured differently, and leaders' titles vary, we know firsthand there are similarities in both the issues we face and the solutions we achieve. As a consortium, we have initiated a dedicated listserv, an open-initiatives program, and targeted biannual face-to-face meetings. These meetings are a place to review our priorities and initiatives, providing a forum for discussion of the strategic and pragmatic issues we, as informatics leaders, individually face at our respective institutions and cancer centers. Here we provide a brief history of the CI4CC organization and meeting highlights from the latest CI4CC meeting that took place in Napa, California from October 14-16, 2019. The focus of this meeting was "intersections between informatics, data science, and population science." We conclude with a discussion on "hot topics" on the horizon for cancer informatics

Analytic Metaphysics versus Naturalized Metaphysics: The Relevance of Applied Ontology

The relevance of analytic metaphysics has come under criticism: Ladyman & Ross, for instance, have suggested do discontinue the field. French & McKenzie have argued in defense of analytic metaphysics that it develops tools that could turn out to be useful for philosophy of physics. In this article, we show first that this heuristic defense of metaphysics can be extended to the scientific field of applied ontology, which uses constructs from analytic metaphysics. Second, we elaborate on a parallel by French & McKenzie between mathematics and metaphysics to show that the whole field of analytic metaphysics, being useful not only for philosophy but also for science, should continue to exist as a largely autonomous field