Accesso Libre: Equity of Access to Information through the Lens of Neoliberal Responsiblization

This paper uses the concept of neoliberal responsibilization, the reductive framing of systemic power dynamics as questions of individual choice and agency, to critically interrogate equity of access to information, a central value of the broader field of library and information science (LIS). Based on a case study of Accesso Libre, a public/private partnership based in a South Los Angeles public library, I argue that equity of access to information is an insufficient concept to evaluate the power dynamics of this (and similar) partnerships, wherein powerful corporations encourage the use of commercial informational resources in minoritized communities. As an alternative, responsibilization directs analysis to different questions about equity, a set of concerns that offer LIS theorists and practitioners a way of reflecting on the ethical commitments at the core of the field.  Pre-print first published online 03/09/201

A General Definition and Nomenclature for Alternative Splicing Events

Understanding the molecular mechanisms responsible for the regulation of the transcriptome present in eukaryotic cells is one of the most challenging tasks in the postgenomic era. In this regard, alternative splicing (AS) is a key phenomenon contributing to the production of different mature transcripts from the same primary RNA sequence. As a plethora of different transcript forms is available in databases, a first step to uncover the biology that drives AS is to identify the different types of reflected splicing variation. In this work, we present a general definition of the AS event along with a notation system that involves the relative positions of the splice sites. This nomenclature univocally and dynamically assigns a specific “AS code” to every possible pattern of splicing variation. On the basis of this definition and the corresponding codes, we have developed a computational tool (AStalavista) that automatically characterizes the complete landscape of AS events in a given transcript annotation of a genome, thus providing a platform to investigate the transcriptome diversity across genes, chromosomes, and species. Our analysis reveals that a substantial part—in human more than a quarter—of the observed splicing variations are ignored in common classification pipelines. We have used AStalavista to investigate and to compare the AS landscape of different reference annotation sets in human and in other metazoan species and found that proportions of AS events change substantially depending on the annotation protocol, species-specific attributes, and coding constraints acting on the transcripts. The AStalavista system therefore provides a general framework to conduct specific studies investigating the occurrence, impact, and regulation of AS

Accesso Libre

This paper uses the concept of neoliberal responsibilization, the reductive framing of systemic power dynamics as questions of individual choice and agency, to critically interrogate equity of access to information, a central value of the broader field of library and information science (LIS). Based on a case study of Accesso Libre, a public/private partnership based in a South Los Angeles public library, I argue that equity of access to information is an insufficient concept to evaluate the power dynamics of this (and similar) partnerships, wherein powerful corporations encourage the use of commercial informational resources in minoritized communities. As an alternative, responsibilization directs analysis to different questions about equity, a set of concerns that offer LIS theorists and practitioners a way of reflecting on the ethical commitments at the core of the field.  Pre-print first published online 03/09/201