Open access assists with cancer breakthrough

Jake Andraka is a 16 year old from the US who's invented a new method for detecting pancreatic cancer that's being called 'potentially revolutionary'. To do it, he used lab time at John Hopkins School of Medicine, and whatever research articles he could get freely on the web - the following video makes some interesting points about the value of open access to research articles:




Open access to research publications is an increasingly prominent issue - both the Australian Research Council and National Health and Medical Research Council now mandate open access to publications which result from their funding (the US National Institutes of Health and Research Councils UK have similar requirements). If you're a researcher, Bond Library can help with this issue - Bond's research repository epublications@bond is one way to make your work instantly available on the web. Contact us for more information.

If you're a student, chances are you've come across the paywalls Jake talks about in that video. Again, the Library can help! Bond pays for access to a huge range of academic articles, and if we don't already have access we can usually get it.So don't pay money for articles - ask us!

Photo sharing for doctors

Here's a fascinating idea which may be of interest to students and staff of HSM: crowdsourced photo-sharing for health professionals. A new iPhone app, called Figure 1, allows doctors and other health professionals to share photos of interesting medical cases they encounter. The medical images may be of things rarely seen, or of textbook examples of more common conditions - all allow health professionals to learn from the situations encountered by others around the world, which might otherwise never be seen.



There's a bit more information on Figure 1 in this article.

Researchers, get started with ORCID in 6 minutes

I've previously posted about the benefits of getting an ORCID identifier for researchers at Bond. If you've not checked ORCID out yet this video gives a great introduction, and shows how to immediately set your profile up using your publications from Scopus:

Here's the link to the Scopus to Orcid wizard in case you missed it in that video. Please get in touch if you have questions about using ORCID!