In the era of big data and global biodiversity decline, there is a pressing need to transform data and information into findable and actionable knowledge. We propose a conceptual classification scheme for invasion science that goes beyond hypothesis networks and allows to organize publications and data sets, guide research directions, and identify knowledge gaps. Combining expert knowledge with literature analysis, we identified five major research themes in this field: introduction pathways, invasion success and invasibility, impacts of invasion, managing biological invasions, and meta-invasion science.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Several health institutions developed strategies to improve health content on Wikimedia platforms given their unparalleled reach. The objective of this study was to compare an online volunteer-based Wikimedia outreach campaign with university course Wikipedia assignments (both focused on improving hearing health content in Wikimedia's public digital knowledge archives), in terms of the reach of the contributions and the extent of the participants' input. A secondary objective was to examine the feasibility and the implementation of the different strategies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe sharing and citation of research data is becoming increasingly recognized as an essential building block in scientific research across various fields and disciplines. Sharing research data allows other researchers to reproduce results, replicate findings, and build on them. Ultimately, this will foster faster cycles in knowledge generation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImproving patient care and advancing scientific discovery requires responsible sharing of research data, healthcare records, biosamples, and biomedical resources that must also respect applicable use conditions. Defining a standard to structure and manage these use conditions is a complex and challenging task. This is exemplified by a near unlimited range of asset types, a high variability of applicable conditions, and differing applications at the individual or collective level.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Jupyter notebooks facilitate the bundling of executable code with its documentation and output in one interactive environment, and they represent a popular mechanism to document and share computational workflows, including for research publications. The reproducibility of computational aspects of research is a key component of scientific reproducibility but has not yet been assessed at scale for Jupyter notebooks associated with biomedical publications.
Approach: We address computational reproducibility at 2 levels: (i) using fully automated workflows, we analyzed the computational reproducibility of Jupyter notebooks associated with publications indexed in the biomedical literature repository PubMed Central.
Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc
October 2023
Urban ecology is a rapidly growing research field that has to keep pace with the pressing need to tackle the sustainability crisis. As an inherently multi-disciplinary field with close ties to practitioners and administrators, research synthesis and knowledge transfer between those different stakeholders is crucial. Knowledge maps can enhance knowledge transfer and provide orientation to researchers as well as practitioners.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis comment discusses the benefits of representing and reusing the information in Electronic Health Record databases as knowledge graphs in the RDF format based on the FHIR RDF specification. As a structured representation of clinical data, FHIR RDF-based electronic health records allow a simpler and more effective integration of biomedical information using semantic alignment, queries, interoperability, and federation to provide better support for health practice and research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeerJ Comput Sci
September 2022
Urgent global research demands real-time dissemination of precise data. Wikidata, a collaborative and openly licensed knowledge graph available in RDF format, provides an ideal forum for exchanging structured data that can be verified and consolidated using validation schemas and bot edits. In this research article, we catalog an automatable task set necessary to assess and validate the portion of Wikidata relating to the COVID-19 epidemiology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContemporary bioinformatic and chemoinformatic capabilities hold promise to reshape knowledge management, analysis and interpretation of data in natural products research. Currently, reliance on a disparate set of non-standardized, insular, and specialized databases presents a series of challenges for data access, both within the discipline and for integration and interoperability between related fields. The fundamental elements of exchange are referenced structure-organism pairs that establish relationships between distinct molecular structures and the living organisms from which they were identified.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic required a rapid and effective response. This included ethical and legally appropriate sharing of data. The European Commission (EC) called upon the Research Data Alliance (RDA) to recruit experts worldwide to quickly develop recommendations and guidelines for COVID-related data sharing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe systemic challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic require cross-disciplinary collaboration in a global and timely fashion. Such collaboration needs open research practices and the sharing of research outputs, such as data and code, thereby facilitating research and research reproducibility and timely collaboration beyond borders. The Research Data Alliance COVID-19 Working Group recently published a set of recommendations and guidelines on data sharing and related best practices for COVID-19 research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this era of information overload and misinformation, it is a challenge to rapidly translate evidence-based health information to the public. Wikipedia is a prominent global source of health information with high traffic, multilingual coverage, and acceptable quality control practices. Viewership data following the Ebola crisis and during the COVID-19 pandemic reveals that a significant number of web users located health guidance through Wikipedia and related projects, including its media repository Wikimedia Commons and structured data complement, Wikidata.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWikidata is a community-maintained knowledge base that has been assembled from repositories in the fields of genomics, proteomics, genetic variants, pathways, chemical compounds, and diseases, and that adheres to the FAIR principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability. Here we describe the breadth and depth of the biomedical knowledge contained within Wikidata, and discuss the open-source tools we have built to add information to Wikidata and to synchronize it with source databases. We also demonstrate several use cases for Wikidata, including the crowdsourced curation of biomedical ontologies, phenotype-based diagnosis of disease, and drug repurposing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSerious concerns about the way research is organized collectively are increasingly being raised. They include the escalating costs of research and lower research productivity, low public trust in researchers to report the truth, lack of diversity, poor community engagement, ethical concerns over research practices, and irreproducibility. Open science (OS) collaborations comprise of a set of practices including open access publication, open data sharing and the absence of restrictive intellectual property rights with which institutions, firms, governments and communities are experimenting in order to overcome these concerns.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFData management plans (DMPs) are documents accompanying research proposals and project outputs. DMPs are created as free-form text and describe the data and tools employed in scientific investigations. They are often seen as an administrative exercise and not as an integral part of research practice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWikipedia is a gateway to knowledge. However, the extent to which this gateway ends at Wikipedia or continues via supporting citations is unknown. Wikipedia's gateway functionality has implications for information design and education, notably in medicine.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure? Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Open Science Prize was established with the following objectives: first, to encourage the crowdsourcing of open data to make breakthroughs that are of biomedical significance; second, to illustrate that funders can indeed work together when scientific interests are aligned; and finally, to encourage international collaboration between investigators with the intent of achieving important innovations that would not be possible otherwise. The process for running the competition and the successes and challenges that arose are presented.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Zika virus (ZIKV) outbreak in the Americas has caused global concern that we may be on the brink of a healthcare crisis. The lack of research on ZIKV in the over 60 years that we have known about it has left us with little in the way of starting points for drug discovery. Our response can build on previous efforts with virus outbreaks and lean heavily on work done on other flaviviruses such as dengue virus.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCentral to research funding are grant proposals that researchers send in to potential funders for review, in the hope of approval. A survey of policies at major research funders found that there is room for more transparency in the process of grant review, which would strengthen the case for the efficiency of public spending on research. On that basis, debate was invited on which transparency measures should be implemented and how, with some concrete suggestions at hand.
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