Harvard goes open access

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/books/14arts-HARVARDRESEA_BRF.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Presentation tips - learning from cognitive science

This is a fun but useful way of presenting some tips to make sure your messages are remembered:
http://io9.com/357063/how-cognitive-science-can-improve-your-powerpoint-presentations

NeSC news Jan/Feb 08

Some interesting stories in the latest NeSC News (http://www.nesc.ac.uk/news/newsletter/January08.pdf):

• an overview of trust and security (to introduce the NeSC theme) which gives a good plain english account of the key issues
• an article on SciSpace (http://scispace.niees.group.cam.ac.uk/) a social networking application developed in Cambridge
• a news item on the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data

Good to see the viznet Showcase and JISC Conference getting a mention too ;-)

Open chemistry

I picked this up a few weeks ago but what with all that's been going on so far this year, it's taken me till now to take a look:
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2008/January/29010803.asp
"Most chemical information on the web is published in closed journals and databases which guarantee high quality but also require a subscription to view. Pre-print servers, collaborative documents, open databases, video sites, online lab notebooks and blogs provide other ways of communicating research. Combining the lot offers the enticing prospect of a vast, free-to-access repository. This could transform the sharing of scientific research if the disparate data sources were machine-readable, so that a search engine could automatically gather data about a particular molecule from a crystal structure, a movie, an online lab book, and an archived article, for example. "

The project will be using standards developed by the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange Project (OAI-ORE) - model protocols are expected to launch next month.

Princelite

Just picked up on this in a story in last week's Computing (7 feb) which mentions development of a light-version of PRINCE2, recognising the fact that in IT, at least, many organisations are not really using PRINCE2 in its entirety but still want some kind of framework to follow. Am going to have to take a look at this when I have a bit more time....
http://www.princelite.co.uk/

Grid in the news

National Grid Service supports 'virtual human' in HIV drug simulation from JISC Headlines:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2008/01/virtualhuman.aspx

"The combined supercomputing power of the JISC-funded UK National Grid Service and the US national grid has enabled UCL (University College London) scientists to simulate the efficacy of an HIV drug in blocking a key protein used by the lethal virus, it was announced today. The method – an early example of the Virtual Physiological Human in action – could one day be used to tailor personal drug treatments, for example for HIV patients developing resistance to their drugs."

Project steering groups

Some interesting tips from BCS pages on what to do when the Steering Group isn't working - from a corporate perspective but still useful:
http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.17003