Archive for March 2010
OneNote and SharePoint to improve collaboration at Pfizer
Drug discovery teams at Pfizer are experiencing Microsoft One Note, synchronized with SharePoint, to make more efficient their collaboration in team management.
MS OneNote has been deployed for Pfizer to help drug discovery teams with collaboration. According the giant, first results are impressive in terms of productivity. OneNote is a kind of project notebook where researchers record and share notes and documents within an intuitive and simple-to-use interface. It is of course completely integrated with Office tools and synchronized with famous document libraries of SharePoint Server, which stays as the central repository. OneNote is now one of the 3 pilars of the KM system at Pfizer (2 others are Newsgator to collect info and Wiki to capitalize internal knowledge). End-users indicated that they feel to save 45 minutes a week with this new solution, which has a significant impact in company revenue. Have been reported also a decrease of emails exchange as well the volume of files stored on servers. Teams are shifting to a “culture of knowledge sharing”, the Holy Grail of KM workers, concluded a manager.
http://iheartonenote.com/2009/11/23/find-out-how-pzfizer-uses-onenote-to-boost-productivity/
Science Citation Index under contestation
An article in Scientometrics is contesting the leadership of the Science Citation Index:
Some of the conclusions and statements:
“The number of serious scientific journals today most likely is about
24,000”
“The first question is whether the growth rate of scientific publication
is declining? The answer is that traditional scientific publishing, that is publication in peer-reviewed journals, is still increasing although there are big differences between fields. There are no indications that the growth rate has decreased in the last 50 years. At the same time, publication using new channels, for example conference proceedings, open archives and home pages, is growing fast.”
“SCI is covering a decreasing part of the traditional scientific literature”
“conference proceedings are especially important in scientific fields
with high growth rates. However, the growth rates for conference proceedings generally are not higher than those found for Journal Articles. It is clear that the increasing importance of conference proceedings is only partially reflected in SCI.”
“National Science Indicators is one of the products offered by Thomson
Reuters. Since this product is based solely on SCI/SCIE, SSCI and AHCI
the use of this product is problematic”
Larsen, Peder Olesen & Ins, Markus von. The rate of growth in scientific publication and the decline in coverage provided by Science Citation Index. Scientometrics, Published online on 10th of March 2010: http://www.springerlink.com/content/2531345r116v3660/
Chemistry journals on FaceBook
Elsevier has released a Facebook profile for some analytical chemistry journals…
According the publisher, “The purpose of the group is to give our community a focus point for discussion on the web, alert people to new content in our journals and provide industry news items each day that we think may be of interest.”
Let’s become a fan!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Analytical-Chemistry-Journals-From-Elsevier/256448407037
Google Wave: the email revolution, at last?
“We send 247 billion emails a day (…) but the basics of email haven’t evolved much since the first one was sent in 1971”
“Google’s answer to this problem is Google Wave”
“Still, Wave is only in a beta or preview state at the moment. And the principle sounds promising. You can imagine using it to collaborate on a article (we nearly wrote this one that way) – someone could write a section, others could comment or edit sentence-by-sentence, and there would be a permanent record of who made what changes and, most importantly, why. Or a project team could use it to keep a record of issues and their resolutions. It’s so powerful that you can run mini programs inside the Wave – an opinion poll, for instance, or a calendar.”
“A couple of types of use are already emerging. One is to use Google Wave to collaboratively take notes during a lecture, talk or conference”
“Collaborative use within the workplace also seems to be a major future role. Tim Panton from Phonefromhere.com has spotted the potential for using Wave with remote workers”
Coles, Malcolm & Belam, Martin. Say Hello to Google Wave! on FUMSI , January 2010. online: http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/share/4438
Google Wave live demo on YouTube:
http://wave.google.com/about.html#video
Free Pharma Ebooks
Freely donwloadable but requires time (quick download is a paid
subscription).
Sometimes old books and rarely the latest editions but you would be
surprised to find out here some nice handbooks, formulations,
pharmacopoeias, etc.
It is worth having a look.
http://www.pharmatext.org/
Monitor Twitter with Monitter
Monitter is a twitter monitor, it lets you “monitter” the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch on a few seconds what people are saying .
The Iphone: a new lab device?
“With a seemingly unlimited number of apps available, the iPhone can be quite a handy tool. An increasing number of apps are targeted to scientists, and lists of must-have apps for researchers have proliferated. There are apps to calculate how to prepare solutions, view restriction enzyme information, search online databases for papers and even store downloaded papers. Well-known product vendors for biological research are also beginning to release laboratory apps for the iPhone. Promega has an app with product information, tutorials, protocols and unit conversion calculators, and Bio-Rad has a quantitative PCR app”.
The Scientist and the Iphone: editorial. Nature Methods, Vol.7, N°2, Feb. 2010, p. 87
http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v7/n2/pdf/nmeth0210-87.pdf
Real time reporting Science
Jean-Claude Bradley: Peer review and science 2.0: blogs, wikis and social networking sites.
Open Notebook Science (ONS) is the practice of making a researchproject publicly available, as soon as it is recorded.
The author gives 7 major tips to be respected to make ONS trusted sources for labs data diffusion.
Science Intelligence and InfoPros 