Leading Professional Society for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Connecting, Training, Empowering, Worldwide
Leading Professional Society for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Connecting, Training, Empowering, Worldwide
| ISMB/ECCB 2009 Live Blog |
During the ISMB/ECCB 2009 conference in Stockholm the ISCB, for the first time, facilitated a blogging forum and actively encouraged bloggers to comment on the conference and the scientific program. The blogs were visible on our main portal site, in the detailed program pages and on the hosting server at FriendFeed. The blogging community turned out to be very active and a large number of talks collected numerous comments with a peek of about 230 comments for Prof. Thomas Lengauer's keynote talk.
You can still access the blogs either on the conference website here or on the FriendFeed server here.
The ISCB is very happy that our experiment was taken up so positively and we would like to thank all the bloggers for their input, which was highly appreciated and contributed significantly to the overall conference experience for bloggers and non-bloggers alike. We certainly plan to repeat this for ISMB 2010 in Boston and have collected some ideas on how to improve and extend the service for ISMB and other ISCB conferences.
Anyone can then join that feed to participate in real-time blogging of the talk with colleagues that might be seated on the opposite side of the aisle, or the opposite side of the globe! You do not need to be attending ISMB/ECCB in Stockholm to blog along with the rest of them.
By embracing blogging as a valuable conference activity we hope to help speed the dissemination of the science presented in Stockholm.
If you are not already subscribed to FriendFeed and think you might want to participate in this activity, sign up in advance and get ready to jump right into the discussions without delay!
In 2008 the U.S. Congress required the National Institutes of Health to implement a Public Access Policy that requires investigators funded by the NIH to submit, or have submitted for them, an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to the National Library of Medicine's digital archive, PubMed Central, to be posted publicly within 12 months after the official date of publication. (See http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/E9-3442.htm for the full notice and analysis of this NIH policy.)
Similarly, in England the Wellcome Trust implemented a like-minded policy for investigators funded with its resources, and in Germany the Max Planck Society committed to paying for all open access publications from any of its institutes.
A new bill, HR 801, was recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, to prohibit any U.S. federal agency from mandating a public access policy as a condition of funding.
Supporters of open access are taking a strong position against HR 801, while organizations that stand to benefit from limiting or eliminating the current NIH policy are standing in favor of the bill.
Members of the senior leadership of ISCB support the current NIH Public Access Policy, and are therefore opposed to HR 801. However, before making any public statements on this issue in the name of ISCB, we are seeking your input. Even if you are not a U.S. citizen or live and work outside of the U.S., your input is important in helping guide ISCB's next steps on this topic.
Please click here to participate in the brief poll to help determine if ISCB shall make a public statement on this issue.
