Serials Spoken Here–Reports of Conferences, Institutes and Seminars

This quarter's column offers a report from the Acquisitions Institute at Timberline Lodge, held May 14–17, 2016, in Timberline Lodge, Oregon, and also provides coverage of multiple sessions from the Kraemer Copyright Conference, held June 6–7, 2016, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Some reports are collected, as well, from the NASIG Annual Conference, held June 9–12, 2016, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference, held June 23–28, 2016, in Orlando, Florida. Lastly, there is a report from the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) World Library and Information Congress, held August 13–19, 2016, in Columbus, Ohio. Topics covered include open access, linked data, copyright, text mining, e-resource management, and digitization

Many Labs 5:Testing pre-data collection peer review as an intervention to increase replicability

Replication studies in psychological science sometimes fail to reproduce prior findings. If these studies use methods that are unfaithful to the original study or ineffective in eliciting the phenomenon of interest, then a failure to replicate may be a failure of the protocol rather than a challenge to the original finding. Formal pre-data-collection peer review by experts may address shortcomings and increase replicability rates. We selected 10 replication studies from the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P; Open Science Collaboration, 2015) for which the original authors had expressed concerns about the replication designs before data collection; only one of these studies had yielded a statistically significant effect (p < .05). Commenters suggested that lack of adherence to expert review and low-powered tests were the reasons that most of these RP:P studies failed to replicate the original effects. We revised the replication protocols and received formal peer review prior to conducting new replication studies. We administered the RP:P and revised protocols in multiple laboratories (median number of laboratories per original study = 6.5, range = 3?9; median total sample = 1,279.5, range = 276?3,512) for high-powered tests of each original finding with both protocols. Overall, following the preregistered analysis plan, we found that the revised protocols produced effect sizes similar to those of the RP:P protocols (?r = .002 or .014, depending on analytic approach). The median effect size for the revised protocols (r = .05) was similar to that of the RP:P protocols (r = .04) and the original RP:P replications (r = .11), and smaller than that of the original studies (r = .37). Analysis of the cumulative evidence across the original studies and the corresponding three replication attempts provided very precise estimates of the 10 tested effects and indicated that their effect sizes (median r = .07, range = .00?.15) were 78% smaller, on average, than the original effect sizes (median r = .37, range = .19?.50)

Reports of conferences, institutes, and seminars

This quarter\u27s column reports on sessions from NASIG 2017: Racing to the Crossroads, held in Indianapolis, IN, June 8 to 11, and ALA Annual 2017: Transforming Our Libraries, Ourselves, which took place in Chicago, IL, June 22–27

Polymer Composite with Carbon Nanofibers Aligned during Thermal Drawing as a Microelectrode for Chronic Neural Interfaces

© 2017 American Chemical Society. Microelectrodes provide a direct pathway to investigate brain activities electrically from the external world, which has advanced our fundamental understanding of brain functions and has been utilized for rehabilitative applications as brain-machine interfaces. However, minimizing the tissue response and prolonging the functional durations of these devices remain challenging. Therefore, the development of next-generation microelectrodes as neural interfaces is actively progressing from traditional inorganic materials toward biocompatible and functional organic materials with a miniature footprint, good flexibility, and reasonable robustness. In this study, we developed a miniaturized all polymer-based neural probe with carbon nanofiber (CNF) composites as recording electrodes via the scalable thermal drawing process. We demonstrated that in situ CNF unidirectional alignment can be achieved during the thermal drawing, which contributes to a drastic improvement of electrical conductivity by 2 orders of magnitude compared to a conventional polymer electrode, while still maintaining the mechanical compliance with brain tissues. The resulting neural probe has a miniature footprint, including a recording site with a reduced size comparable to a single neuron and maintained impedance that was able to capture neural activities. Its stable functionality as a chronic implant has been demonstrated with the long-term reliable electrophysiological recording with single-spike resolution and the minimal tissue response over the extended period of implantation in wild-type mice. Technology developed here can be applied to basic chronic electrophysiological studies as well as clinical implementation for neuro-rehabilitative applications

Polymer Composite with Carbon Nanofibers Aligned during Thermal Drawing as a Microelectrode for Chronic Neural Interfaces

Microelectrodes provide a direct pathway to investigate brain activities electrically from the external world, which has advanced our fundamental understanding of brain functions and has been utilized for rehabilitative applications as brain–machine interfaces. However, minimizing the tissue response and prolonging the functional durations of these devices remain challenging. Therefore, the development of next-generation microelectrodes as neural interfaces is actively progressing from traditional inorganic materials toward biocompatible and functional organic materials with a miniature footprint, good flexibility, and reasonable robustness. In this study, we developed a miniaturized all polymer-based neural probe with carbon nanofiber (CNF) composites as recording electrodes <i>via</i> the scalable thermal drawing process. We demonstrated that <i>in situ</i> CNF unidirectional alignment can be achieved during the thermal drawing, which contributes to a drastic improvement of electrical conductivity by 2 orders of magnitude compared to a conventional polymer electrode, while still maintaining the mechanical compliance with brain tissues. The resulting neural probe has a miniature footprint, including a recording site with a reduced size comparable to a single neuron and maintained impedance that was able to capture neural activities. Its stable functionality as a chronic implant has been demonstrated with the long-term reliable electrophysiological recording with single-spike resolution and the minimal tissue response over the extended period of implantation in wild-type mice. Technology developed here can be applied to basic chronic electrophysiological studies as well as clinical implementation for neuro-rehabilitative applications