Alltrials: sign up to make clinical trials countIt’s International Clinical Trials day and it’s time all clinical trial results are reported. Results from around half of clinical trials have never been published. Information on what was done and what was found in these trials could be lost forever to doctors and researchers, leading to bad treatment decisions, missed opportunities for good medicine,…

Using video abstracts to promote readershipBefore Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, there was the printed word.  Most of us learned new information, shared our ideas, promoted our research, and generally connected though a learning community by reading, writing, and publishing papers through established journals.  A colleague recently told me that when she was writing what became a well-known article in…

How to judge the news value of your paperJournalists at all levels of the media, from the local weekly newspaper to 24 hour rolling television news, share the common traits of being perennially understaffed and under pressure to find stories under tight deadlines. So how do you grab their attention? Here are ten things to consider when evaluating your paper for publicity: Relevance…

Is crowdfunding making science sexy? An interview with Experiment's Denny LuanWe recently spoke to Denny Luan, co-founder of Experiment about crowdfunding for research and the future.  Curiosity has led Denny down some very different paths, involving race cars, anthrax research, and microfinance. He has degrees from the University of Washington in biochemistry and economics, where he spent time making circuits out of bacteria. Q. When, how and…

A Day in the Life of LIS graduate student Brandon Thomas LockeOur "Day in the life" series featuring early career researchers continues with Brandon Locke, an MLIS student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds an MA in History from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is interested in Digital Humanities, scholarly communication, and data curation. Q.…

Visual capabilities, information visualization concepts, and data repositoriesI recently attended a talk by Anselm Spoerri where he outlined some basic principles of information visualization. Spoerri is a professor in the School of Communication at Rutgers University. His research and teaching focus is on Information Visualization, Information Retrieval & Knowledge Management, Multimedia Interfaces & Retrieval, and Computer Vision.  The goal of Spoerri’s work…

Seven things to consider when preparing your book proposalLike many things, a good book starts with a great idea, but how do you develop that idea so that a publisher might be interested in working with you? Start by creating an initial proposal outlining your idea and why you think it would make a good publishing project. When submitting a proposal to a…

#PeerReview-now trending on a newsfeed near youIt’s hard to match the buzzworthiness of peer review. Over the past several months alone, a number of conferences and workshops have tackled the topic, spawning lively debates in the Twittersphere and on blogs well after the events themselves concluded (overviews of Peer Review Watch’s Is Peer Review Broken? and BioMed Central’s Editors’ Conference are…

His life is Open Access and Open Data: meet Mark Thorley of RCUKQ: First of all Mark, thanks for taking the time to talk to us.  Can you tell us what your role at RCUK involves? A: I’m part of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), one of the 7 Research Councils that make up Research Councils UK (RCUK). My remit includes scholarly communications - of which the…

Meet @informationista: a Q&A with librarian Elaine AlligoodElaine Alligood is the Chief, Library Service for the Boston VA Healthcare System’s three campuses and is the 2013 recipient of the Vagainas Librarian of the year award.  Q. Can you please explain your current role and how it came about? A. It’s an ironic tale for sure! In March of 2011 I worked at VA Boston…