Julia Stewart Lowndes is a marine ecologist and advocate for the open science movement and kinder, better science. [1] [2] The focus of her work is promoting openness to data in the scientific community, and helping fellow researchers learn how to work with open data and the processes surrounding it. [3] [4] She seeks to use this method to promote scientific communities and research. [5] [2]
Stewart Lowndes is the founder and co-director of Openscapes, a mentorship program that teaches researchers how to use data and code in their labs, work with open-source software, and network with peers in the same field. [6] She also is an instructor for The Carpentries, as well as the co-founder of the groups Eco-Data-Science and R-Ladies Santa Barbara. [2] Lowndes was a Mozilla Fellow. [3] She has led the Ocean Health Index science program in the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, where she currently works. [6] [1] Lowndes frequently speaks at conferences regarding the use of data in science and the promotion of open scientific communities, recently including SORTEE and Cascadia R Conference. [7] [2]
She received her PhD from Stanford University. [5] Her dissertation, completed in 2012, was on the Humboldt squid; she observed the drivers and impact of the species with relation to the changing climate. [8] [5] [9]
Structural biology is a field that is many centuries old which, as defined by the Journal of Structural Biology, deals with structural analysis of living material at every level of organization. Early structural biologists throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries were primarily only able to study structures to the limit of the naked eye's visual acuity and through magnifying glasses and light microscopes.
Nature is a British weekly scientific journal founded and based in London, England. As a multidisciplinary publication, Nature features peer-reviewed research from a variety of academic disciplines, mainly in science and technology. It has core editorial offices across the United States, continental Europe, and Asia under the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature. Nature was one of the world's most cited scientific journals by the Science Edition of the 2019 Journal Citation Reports, making it one of the world's most-read and most prestigious academic journals. As of 2012, it claimed an online readership of about three million unique readers per month.
Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-level subject fields: life sciences, social sciences, physical sciences and health sciences. It covers three types of sources: book series, journals, and trade journals. All journals covered in the Scopus database are reviewed for sufficiently high quality each year according to four types of numerical quality measure for each title; those are h-Index, CiteScore, SJR and SNIP. Searches in Scopus also incorporate searches of patent database Lexis-Nexis, albeit with a limited functionality.
The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as indexed by Clarivate's Web of Science. As a journal-level metric, it is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher impact factor values are given the status of being more important, or carry more prestige in their respective fields, than those with lower values. While frequently used by universities and funding bodies to decide on promotion and research proposals, it has come under attack for distorting good scientific practices.
Michael Aaron Nielsen is a quantum physicist, science writer, and computer programming researcher living in San Francisco.
The Humboldt squid, also known as jumbo squid or jumbo flying squid (EN), and Pota in Peru or Jibia in Chile (ES) is a large, predatory squid living in the eastern Pacific Ocean. It is the only known species of the genus Dosidicus of the subfamily Ommastrephinae, family Ommastrephidae.
PLOS One is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) since 2006. The journal covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine. The Public Library of Science began in 2000 with an online petition initiative by Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, formerly director of the National Institutes of Health and at that time director of Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center; Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University; and Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Open peer review is the various possible modifications of the traditional scholarly peer review process. The three most common modifications to which the term is applied are:
The Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) is an independent biomedical research organisation founded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim. The institute employs around 250 people from over 40 countries, who perform basic research. IMBA is located at the Vienna BioCenter (VBC) and shares facilities and scientific training programs with the Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology (GMI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), the basic research center of Boehringer Ingelheim.
The Denisovans or Denisova hominins(di-NEE-sə-və) are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic human that ranged across Asia during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic. Denisovans are known from few physical remains and consequently, most of what is known about them comes from DNA evidence. No formal species name has been established pending more complete fossil material.
Scientific Reports is a peer-reviewed open-access scientific mega journal published by Nature Portfolio, covering all areas of the natural sciences. The journal was established in 2011. The journal states that their aim is to assess solely the scientific validity of a submitted paper, rather than its perceived importance, significance, or impact.
OurResearch, formerly known as ImpactStory, is a nonprofit organization which creates and distributes tools and services for libraries, institutions and researchers. The organization follows open practices with their data, code, and governance. OurResearch is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and Arcadia Fund.
Our World in Data (OWID) is a scientific online publication that focuses on large global problems such as poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality.
Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is a cryomicroscopy technique applied on samples cooled to cryogenic temperatures. For biological specimens, the structure is preserved by embedding in an environment of vitreous ice. An aqueous sample solution is applied to a grid-mesh and plunge-frozen in liquid ethane or a mixture of liquid ethane and propane. While development of the technique began in the 1970s, recent advances in detector technology and software algorithms have allowed for the determination of biomolecular structures at near-atomic resolution. This has attracted wide attention to the approach as an alternative to X-ray crystallography or NMR spectroscopy for macromolecular structure determination without the need for crystallization.
Open access in India was begun in May 2004, when two workshops were organized by the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai. This laid the foundation for the Open Access movement in India. In 2006, the National Knowledge Commission in its recommendations proposed that "access to knowledge is the most fundamental way of increasing the opportunities and reach of individuals and groups". In 2009, the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) began requiring that its grantees provide open access to funded research. In 2011, the Open Access India forum formulated a draft policy on Open Access for India. Currently, the Directory of Open Access Journals lists 326 open access journals published in India, of which 233 have no fees.
Kate Marvel is a climate scientist and science writer based in New York City. She is an Associate Research Scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia Engineering's Department of Applied Physics and Mathematics, and writes regularly for Scientific American in her column "Hot Planet."
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences is a research institute on virology administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which reports to the State Council of the People's Republic of China. The institute is one of nine independent organisations in the Wuhan Branch of the CAS. Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory. The institute has collaborated with the Galveston National Laboratory in the United States, the Centre International de Recherche en Infectiologie in France, and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada. The institute has been an active premier research center for the study of coronaviruses.
Jonathan Neal Pruitt is a former academic researcher. He was an Associate Professor of behavioral ecology and Canada 150 Research Chair in Biological Dystopias at McMaster University. Pruitt's research focused primarily on animal personalities and the social behavior of spiders and other organisms.
Sif Island is an island in Pine Island Bay of the Amundsen Sea, in Antarctica. It is 1,150 feet (350 m) long and consists of potassium feldspar granite, mostly covered in ice. It was discovered in February 2020 after the Pine Island Glacier melted away from around it, and is named after Sif, an Æsir goddess associated with the Earth in Norse mythology. It is plausible that the island emerged as a result of post-glacial rebound, a process in which retreating glaciers relieve pressure on the ground, causing it to rise.
Emma Hodcroft is a British-American molecular epidemiologist at the Institute for Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Bern. Her research focuses on the phylogenetics of viruses and other pathogens, mapping the spread and evolution of different genetic variants. Hodcroft is a developer on the Nextstrain project, an open science project that tracks the transmission chains of SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens. In 2020, she originated CoVariants.org, a project tracking SARS-CoV-2 variants.