STEM Librarians and the Future of Scholarly Publishing: Scholarly Communication Concepts that Researchers Need

This narrative reflection describes how five librarians developed a scholarly communication workshop intended for a specific conference with an audience of science researchers, then proceeded to modify it to fulfill different professional development opportunities. We explored themes around open access, the current and future landscape of scholarly publishing, and the decision factors for researchers when choosing a journal to submit papers to. Identifying further venues for the workshop and submitting formal and informal proposals leveraged our knowledge of our own professional associations and what might appeal to those audiences

Identifying Opportunities in Citizen Science for Academic Libraries

Citizen science projects continue to grow in popularity, providing opportunities for non-expert volunteers to contribute to and become personally invested in rigorous scientific research. Academic libraries, aiming to promote and provide tools and resources to master scientific and information literacy, can support these efforts. While few examples currently exist of academic libraries involved in citizen science, this article identifies potential roles in community building; data curation; scholarly communication reform; and provision of space, technology, and resources

Determining the impacts of hospital cost-sharing on the uninsured near-poor households in Vietnam

Objectives: The study objective was to identify the size of different hospital financing sources for different hospital services and their impact on the uninsured. Methods: A panel dataset of 84 public general hospitals (2005–2008) with cross-section data on hospital activity and hospital revenue was created and used to calculate unit costs of different hospital services by applying multiple regression models. The resulting risk of catastrophic health expenditure (CHE) was estimated based on official income statistics. Results: Average user fees (UF) for outpatient visits and inpatient bed days were US$4.13 and US$20.27, while actual full costs (AFC) were US$8.41 and US$36.66, respectively. These unit costs were 2.5 times higher in hospitals at the central versus the provincial level. UF for surgical inpatient bed days were 3.6 times that of non-surgical treatments (US$47.50 vs. 12.87) and AFC 5.0 times (US$101.72 vs. 20.08). UF accounted for 44.6%-77.9% of the AFC, the rest (22.1%-55.4%) was provided by direct government support (DGS). One surgical inpatient treatment at either central or provincial hospital level and one non-surgical inpatient treatment at central hospital level, immediately pushed uninsured near-poor households at risk of CHE. Conclusions: Around 45% of hospital AFC was paid by DGS, the larger rest by UF. UF have become a great financial burden on the uninsured near-poor households, who have to pay for these out-of-pocket and therefore may not utilize even necessary services. If the rate of DGS were reduced, this would have the effect of increasing UF, but the savings to Government could be spent on subsidizing insurance to ensure that a larger part of the population can cover UF through insurance, especially the near-poor households

Physical therapy for sleep apnea: a smartphone application for home-based physical therapy for patients with obstructive sleep apnea

PurposeIn this study, we described “PT for Sleep Apnea”, a smartphone application for home-based physical therapy of patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA).MethodsThe application was created in a joint program between the University of Medicine and Pharmacy at Ho Chi Minh City (UMP), Vietnam, and National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Taiwan. Exercises maneuvers were derived from the exercise program previously published by the partner group at National Cheng Kung University. They included exercises for upper airway and respiratory muscle training and general endurance training.ResultsThe application provides video and in-text tutorials for users to follow at home and a schedule function to assist the user in organizing the training program, which may improve the efficacy of home-based physical therapy in patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea.ConclusionIn the future, our group plans to conduct a user study and randomized-controlled trials to investigate whether our application can benefit patients with OSA

Natural and recombinant equine chorionic gonadotropins past and future in animal reproductive technology

Equine Chorionic Gonadotropin (eCG) previously named Pregnant Mare Serum Gonadotropin (PMSG) has been widely used since the 40s in animal reproduction control. It is extracted from the blood of pregnant mares between days 40 and 120 of gestation. Animal welfare organizations have voiced concerns against mares bleeding conditions. There is currently no effective substitute for the natural PMSG. In this review, we summarize the basic knowledge of the structure and biology of eCG, and the research on recombinant eCG production in the past five years

A comprehensive study on the efficacy of a wearable sleep aid device featuring closed-loop real-time acoustic stimulation

Difficulty falling asleep is one of the typical insomnia symptoms. However, intervention therapies available nowadays, ranging from pharmaceutical to hi-tech tailored solutions, remain ineffective due to their lack of precise real-time sleep tracking, in-time feedback on the therapies, and an ability to keep people asleep during the night. This paper aims to enhance the efficacy of such an intervention by proposing a novel sleep aid system that can sense multiple physiological signals continuously and simultaneously control auditory stimulation to evoke appropriate brain responses for fast sleep promotion. The system, a lightweight, comfortable, and user-friendly headband, employs a comprehensive set of algorithms and dedicated own-designed audio stimuli. Compared to the gold-standard device in 883 sleep studies on 377 subjects, the proposed system achieves (1) a strong correlation (0.89 ± 0.03) between the physiological signals acquired by ours and those from the gold-standard PSG, (2) an 87.8% agreement on automatic sleep scoring with the consensus scored by sleep technicians, and (3) a successful non-pharmacological real-time stimulation to shorten the duration of sleep falling by 24.1 min. Conclusively, our solution exceeds existing ones in promoting fast falling asleep, tracking sleep state accurately, and achieving high social acceptance through a reliable large-scale evaluation

Spoligotyping and Drug Resistance Analysis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Strains from National Survey in China

BACKGROUND: Tuberculosis (TB), caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC), is one of the major causes of death in the world today. Although China has the second largest global case rate of tuberculosis, a systematic study of TB prevalence in China has not been completed. From 2006 to 2007, the base line surveillance of tuberculosis was carried out by Ministry of Health, and more than 4000 representative strains were selected from 31 provinces in China. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: The aim of the present research was to survey the genotypes of representative Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) strains from China using spacer oligonucleotide typing (spoligotyping), and to analyze the relationship between genotype and drug resistance for the first time. A total of 4017 clinical isolates were collected from 2007 to 2008 throughout China. Among those M. tuberculosis isolates, 2500 (62.2%) isolates were Beijing genotypes. The percentage of Beijing genotypes in northern China was higher than in southern China (76.5% vs. 53.2%). Additionally, the frequencies of rifampin-resistant, ofloxacin-resistant and multidrug-resistant isolates were significantly higher in Beijing genotype strains than non-Beijing strains. Furthermore, a novel genotype named "China Southern genotype (CS)" was only isolated from Fujian and Guangdong provinces. Hence, it is very practical to uncover the reason for prevalence of the CS type in southern China. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: In conclusion, Beijing family genotypes were still the predominant genotype throughout China, which exhibited a greater correlation with rifampin-resistance, ofloxacin-resistance and MDR phenotypes than other TB spoligotypes, and some regions of China showed several unique characters in the distribution of M. tuberculosis genotypes. Our research represents an important contribution for the TB control and research community, which completes broad pictures on drug resistance levels and distribution of M. tuberculosis strain types over China