It’s not just the superbloom, either.

Angelina Fanny Hesse, who provided the key insight that allows scientists to grow and isolate bacteria in the lab, was written out of history. Here is her story.

Old-fashioned ways of reporting new discoveries are holding back medical research. Some scientists are pushing for change

Issue brief?

Until recently, collections of specimens were basically left in drawers and were not easily searchable on-line but the digitization process is now making them available to researchers worldwide

Website for the Darwin Core standard

Vines et al. ask authors for the data underlying papers between 2 and 22 years old and find that the odds of it being reported extant decrease by 17% for every year since publication.

Over the last decade, there have been significant changes in data sharing policies and in the data sharing environment faced by life science researchers. Using data from a 2013 survey of over 1600 life science researchers, we analyze the effects of sharing policies of funding agencies and journals. We also examine the effects of new sharing infrastructure and tools (i.e., third party repositories and online supplements). We find that recently enacted data sharing policies and new sharing infrastructure and tools have had a sizable effect on encouraging data sharing. In particular, third party repositories and online supplements as well as data sharing requirements of funding agencies, particularly the NIH and the National Human Genome Research Institute, were perceived by scientists to have had a large effect on facilitating data sharing. In addition, we found a high degree of compliance with these new policies, although noncompliance resulted in few formal or informal sanctions. Despite the overall effectiveness of data sharing policies, some significant gaps remain: about one third of grant reviewers placed no weight on data sharing plans in their reviews, and a similar percentage ignored the requirements of material transfer agreements. These patterns suggest that although most of these new policies have been effective, there is still room for policy improvement.

Gosh. Whoodathunkit?

BioNames is a web database of taxonomic names for animals, linked to the primary literature and, wherever possible, to phylogenetic trees. It aims to provide a taxonomic “dashboard” where at a glance we can see a summary of the taxonomic and phylogenetic information we have for a given taxon and hence provide a quick answer to the basic question “what is this taxon?” BioNames combines classifications from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and GenBank, images from the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), animal names from the Index of Organism Names (ION), and bibliographic data from multiple sources including the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and CrossRef. The user interface includes display of full text articles, interactive timelines of taxonomic publications, and zoomable phylogenies. It is available at http://bionames.org.

I've just returned from the International Conference on Biomedical Ontology  (ICBO) which is the biggest conference in the field of bio-onto...

Has tools, training, intro material, etc.

A comprehensive framework to encourage and facilitate the sharing of biodiversity data has been published in a peer-reviewed journal.