Unveiling the Path to Equitable Knowledge. Challenging Knowledge Monopoly: Access, Equity, and Quality in the Digital Era.

In the digital age, the privatization and monopolization of knowledge have become prominent issues, particularly in the field of medical education and practice. Influential platforms like Amboss and the Association for the Study of Internal Fixation AO have emerged as gatekeepers, controlling access to medical knowledge through paywalls and potentially shaping treatment approaches. Concerns arise due to the selective dissemination of information, where conservative treatment approaches may be downplayed. In contrast initiatives that prioritize equal access to knowledge have been introduced, such as the WHO Surgery at the District Hospital program and internationally renowned textbooks like "Primary surgery" and "War surgery." Another area of concern is authorship, with a growing emphasis on advocating for equal cooperative authorship and challenging hierarchical structures. Alternative models promoting inclusivity and diversity in the authorship process are being explored. Additionally, there is a pressing need to prioritize quality over quantity in scientific publications. Strategies such as rigorous peer review processes and emphasizing impactful research are being discussed to address this issue. The implications of knowledge monopolization and dissemination are not limited to developed countries. Russian pirate platforms have significant implications for knowledge dissemination, copyright protection, and research availability, particularly in the Global South. Language barriers and biases against certain regions or nations further amplify the underrepresentation of voices in the scientific community. Interdisciplinary dialogue is crucial in advancing equitable knowledge access and exploring alternative approaches in the digital era. By fostering open discussions, the aim is to deepen the understanding of knowledge monopolies, encourage equal access to information, and seek innovative solutions in authorship, publication, and knowledge dissemination. The ultimate goal is to create a more inclusive and accessible landscape for the advancement of knowledge across various disciplines. All authors contributed equally

A one-compartment, direct glucose fuel cell for powering long-term medical implants

We present the operational concept, microfabrication, and electrical performance of an enzyme-less direct glucose fuel cell for harvesting the chemical energy of glucose from body fluids. The spatial concentrations of glucose and oxygen at the electrodes of the one-compartment setup are established by self-organization, governed by the balance of electro-chemical depletion and membrane diffusion. Compared to less stable enzymatic and immunogenic microbial fuel cells, this robust approach excels with an extended life time, the amenability to sterilization and biocompatibility, showing up a clear route towards an autonomous power supply for long-term medical implants without the need of surgical replacement and external refueling. Operating in physiological phosphate buffer solution containing 0.1 wt% glucose and having a geometrical cathode area of 10 cm2, our prototype already delivers 20 µ W peak power over a period of 7 days

Unveiling the Path to Equitable Knowledge. Challenging Knowledge Monopoly: Access, Equity, and Quality in the Digital Era

In the digital age, the privatization and monopolization of knowledge have become prominent issues, particularly in the field of medical education and practice. Influential platforms like Amboss and the Association for the Study of Internal Fixation AO have emerged as gatekeepers, controlling access to medical knowledge through paywalls and potentially shaping treatment approaches. Concerns arise due to the selective dissemination of information, where conservative treatment approaches may be downplayed. In contrast initiatives that prioritize equal access to knowledge have been introduced, such as the WHO Surgery at the District Hospital program and internationally renowned textbooks like "Primary surgery" and "War surgery." Another area of concern is authorship, with a growing emphasis on advocating for equal cooperative authorship and challenging hierarchical structures. Alternative models promoting inclusivity and diversity in the authorship process are being explored. Additionally, there is a pressing need to prioritize quality over quantity in scientific publications. Strategies such as rigorous peer review processes and emphasizing impactful research are being discussed to address this issue. The implications of knowledge monopolization and dissemination are not limited to developed countries. Russian pirate platforms have significant implications for knowledge dissemination, copyright protection, and research availability, particularly in the Global South. Language barriers and biases against certain regions or nations further amplify the underrepresentation of voices in the scientific community. Interdisciplinary dialogue is crucial in advancing equitable knowledge access and exploring alternative approaches in the digital era. By fostering open discussions, the aim is to deepen the understanding of knowledge monopolies, encourage equal access to information, and seek innovative solutions in authorship, publication, and knowledge dissemination. The ultimate goal is to create a more inclusive and accessible landscape for the advancement of knowledge across various disciplines. All authors contributed equally

Adaptive Lossy Compression of Complex Environmental Indices Using Seasonal Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average Models

Significant increases in computational resources have enabled the development of more complex and spatially better resolved weather and climate models. As a result the amount of output generated by data assimilation systems and by weather and climate simulations is rapidly increasing e.g. due to higher spatial resolution, more realisations and higher frequency data. However, while compute performance has increased significantly because of better scaling program code and increasing number of cores the storage capacity is only increasing slowly. One way to tackle the data storage problem is data compression. Here, we build the groundwork for an environmental data compressor by improving compression for established weather and climate indices like El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (QBO). We investigate options for compressing these indices by using a statistical method based on the Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model. The introduced adaptive approach shows that it is possible to improve accuracy of lossily compressed data by applying an adaptive compression method which preserves selected data with higher precision. Our analysis reveals no potential for lossless compression of these indices. However, as the ARIMA model is able to capture all relevant temporal variability, lossless compression is not necessary and lossy compression is acceptable. The reconstruction based on the lossily compressed data can reproduce the chosen indices to such a high degree that statistically relevant information needed for describing climate dynamics is preserved. The performance of the (seasonal) ARIMA model was tested with daily and monthly indices

A surface mountable glucose fuel cell for medical implants

We present an enzymeless, surface mountable glucose fuel cell based on abiotic catalysts. The device is intended as an energy harvesting implantable power supply for low power medical implants and sensors. After 50 days of operation in physiological glucose solution the fuel cell exhibited a stable performance of 1.1 muW/cm2. The demonstrated lifetime of our glucose fuel cell therefore already exceeds the maximum lifetime reported for devices based on enzymatic catalysts. This renders the concept a promising approach for the development of autonomous and sustainable power supply systems for long- term medical implants

Ozone assessment as an EOSC-Synergy thematic service

Ozone assessment is an important task for Climate and Environment studies. The ozone assessment service (O3as) project is going to support scientists and everyone interested in determining ozone trends for different parts of the world. It is one of the thematic services of the EOSC-Synergy project. The service applies a unified approach to analyse results from a large number of different chemistry-climate models, helps to harmonise the calculation of ozone trends efficiently and consistently, and produce publication-quality figures in a coherent and user-friendly way. Among other tasks it will aid scientists to prepare the quadrennial Global Assessment of Ozone depletion. It will also allow access to the high-level data by citizens. The service relies on several containerized components distributed across the cloud (Kubernetes) and HPC resources and leverages large scale data facility (LSDF)

An online service for analysing ozone trends within EOSC-synergy

The European Open Science Cloud-Synergy (EOSC-Synergy) project delivers services that serve to expand the use of EOSC. One of these services, O3as, is being developed for scientists using chemistry-climate models to determine time series and eventually ozone trends for potential use in the quadrennial Global Assessment of Ozone Depletion, which will be published in 2022. A unified approach from a service like ours, which analyses results from a large number of different climate models, helps to harmonise the calculation of ozone trends efficiently and consistently. With O3as, publication-quality figures can be reproduced quickly and in a coherent way. This is done via a web application where users configure their queries to perform simple analyses. These queries are passed to the O3as service via an O3as REST API call. There, the O3as service processes the query and accesses the reduced dataset. To create a reduced dataset, regular tasks are executed on a high performance computer (HPC) to copy the primary data and perform data preparation (e.g. data reduction, standardisation and parameter unification). O3as uses EGI check-in (OIDC) to identify users and grant access to certain functionalities of the service, udocker (a tool to run Docker containers in multi-user space without root privileges) to perform data reduction in the HPC environment, and the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) Infrastructure Manager to provision service resources (Kubernetes)