Hundreds of biomedical databases are scattered around the web and now BioMed Central has created a page listing them in more than 40 categories. The databases are from a variety of large organizations and individual research groups. The categories include:

• Bioinformatics (202 databases)
• Cell Biology (73)
• Genetics (446)
• Genomics (476)
• Medical Imaging (6)
• Molecular Biology (287)
• Plant Biology (129)
• Proteomics (86)

Big Ideas @ Berkeley and the Berkeley student government (ASUC) recently announced the third annual Bears Breaking Boundaries contest. According to the website:

[The two organizations] are teaming up with a variety of research centers and institutes on the campus to organize a series of “idea competitions” that will encourage student teams to propose the next generation of research, education, and service activities on the UC Berkeley campus.

The deadline for most of the competitions is April 14, 2008, though some competitions have earlier deadlines. The competitions fall into the following areas:

• Computational Nanoscience Innovation
• Curricular Innovation
• Energy and Environmental Innovation
• Idea Labs
• Improving Student Life
• Information Technology for Society
• Neglected Diseases
• Partnerships for Social Innovation
• Social Entrepreneurship in India
• Synthetic Biology

For more information, including Rules and Guidelines and Past Winners, see the contest website.

UC Berkeley's Vice-Chancellor for Research and the University Librarian are co-sponsoring a pilot project supporting Berkeley researchers who want to make their publications freely available to the public. The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative - BRII - was announced on January 21st, 2008. According to the BRII website:

The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) supports faculty members who want to make their journal articles free to all readers immediately upon publication.

An 18-month pilot program, BRII will subsidize, in various degrees, fees charged to authors who select open access or paid access publication. The pilot will also yield data that can be used to gauge faculty interest in — as well as the budgetary impacts of — these new modes of scholarly communication on the Berkeley campus.

More information can be found at the BRII website at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/brii/. Visit the UC Berkeley Library's Scholarly Communication page to learn more about Open Access publishing.

We are pleased to announce the availability of the Proceedings of the Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics & Probability (1949-1972) online through Project Euclid. These proceedings are available on an Open Access basis.

This effort was made possible by the work and support of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Project Euclid, the Cornell University Library, and the UC Berkeley Libraries.

SciFinder Scholar 2007 for Mac OS X, released in June 2007, is incompatible with Apple Intel powered computers using Mac OS X Leopard (10.5), released in October 2007.

A workaround is now available. This is a "quick fix" pending further development investigation, code change, and quality testing.

Beginning on December 28, 2007, citations from the 1949 Current List of Medical Literature(CLML) were added to the OLDMEDLINE subset in PubMed. These 55,557 citations have not yet been assigned Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). To search PubMed for citations originating from OLDMEDLINE, add the following to your search statement in the Search box: AND jsubsetom. For additional information about the OLDMEDLINE data project, see http://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/databases_oldmedline.html.

In addition, many individual journals have digitized their back content and deposited the full text issues in PubMed Central. These old articles - some back to 1865 - are also in PubMed.

Back in December, just as we were heading into our busy finals period, Dan Cohen (George Mason University) announced that Zotero and the Internet Archive had joined forces:

I’m pleased to announce a major alliance between the Zotero project at the Center for History and New Media and the Internet Archive. It’s really a match made in heaven—a project to provide free and open source software and services for scholars joining together with the leading open library.

The post discusses five key elements of the project, which will be developed over the coming months:

1. Exposing and Sharing the "Hidden Archive"
2. Searching the Personal Library
3. Enabling Networked References and Annotations
4. Simplifying Collaborative Sharing
5. Facilitating Scholarly Discovery

Zotero "is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources."