Electronic reserve services at UNC-Chapel Hill: Faculty and student perceptions of personal control, access, and service quality

This paper examines the current state of practice and management of electronic course reserve systems. The results of a Fall 2003 survey of 89 faculty, graduate, and undergraduate users of the UNC-Chapel Hill E-Reserves system, which uses Docutek ERes, are presented. Complementary use of course management software, the influence of copyright, and need for copyright management features are discussed. Survey questions addressed attitudes of users toward customer service from Reserves Staff; legibility of materials; preferences for paper vs. the electronic; the user-initiated, navigability-related, and environmental limitations of access; information about points of access; printing services; and perceptions of usability

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Evidence for involvement of the C-terminal domain in the dimerization of the CopY repressor protein from Enterococcus hirae

Metal binding to the C-terminal region of the copper-responsive repressor protein CopY is responsible for homodimerization and the regulation of the copper homeostasis pathway in Enterococcus hirae. Specific involvement of the 38 C-terminal residues of CopY in dimerization is indicated by zonal and frontal (large zone) size-exclusion chromatography studies. The studies demonstrate that the attachment of these CopY residues to the immunoglobulin-binding domain of streptococcal protein G (GB1) promotes dimerization of the monomeric protein. Although sensitivity of dimerization to removal of metal from the fusion protein is smaller than that found for CopY (as measured by ultracentrifugation studies), the demonstration that an unrelated protein (GB1) can be induced to dimerize by extending its sequence with the C-terminal portion of CopY confirms the involvement of this region in CopY homodimerization

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press