DRIVER "is a multi-phase effort whose vision and primary objective is to establish a cohesive, pan-European infrastructure of Digital Repositories, offering sophisticated functionality ervices to both researchers and the general public. It sets out to build an advanced infrastructure for the future knowledge of the European Research Area. Aimed to be complimentary to GEANT2, the successful infrastructure for computing resources, data storage and data transport, DRIVER will deliver the content resources, i.e. any form of scientific output, including scientific/technical reports, working papers, pre-prints, articles and original research data. The vision is to establish the successful interoperation of both data network and knowledge repositories as integral parts of the E-infrastructure for research and education in Europe."

In English, this just means that you can search lots of open repositories across Europe from one place, which is an excellent idea.

They are looking for researchers to evaluate the service via a short online
questionnaire.

Darwin

St Andrews is celebrating the 200th Anniversary of the birth of Darwin next week with a number of events including talks and special exhibitions. From the press release:

"Correspondence from the University's Special Collections will be displayed alongside images of plant specimens collected during the Voyage of the Beagle.

The exhibition forms the centrepiece of a series of events at the University of St Andrews to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.

The collection includes a letter sent by Charles Darwin in October 1844 to James David Forbes (1809 - 1868), an eminent Scottish scientist in the field of glaciology."

For more information see Darwin 200 in St Andrews

2009 Horizon Report

Reflecting Sea,
originally uploaded by Viche.

The 2009 Horizon Report is out this month. It looks at future trends in technology in education for the next five years. It is compiled very quickly (so things do not go out of date by the time it is published.)

This year’s report highlights innovations that we will be seeing more of in

Less that 1 year
- mobile technology
- cloud computing

2-3 years
- what it calls ‘geo-everything’, which refers to the ability of the commonness pieces of kit to know where they are and feed the information back.
- The personal web

4-5 years
- semantic web applications
- smart objects

It makes interesting reading. There are many interesting examples of applications being used at the moment in higher education in the sciences.

Scitable

Scitable is a new free social learning site offered by Nature Education. The blurb says that it “brings together a library of scientific overviews with a world wide community of scientists, researchers, teachers, and student.” As well as student collaboration and learning it allows academics to “maintain an evidence-based online course pack for your students.”

The content is taken from Nature Group publishing as well as WH Freeman and Sinauer Associates.

There are topic rooms covering individual areas where you can find articles on a subject, key concepts and links to discussion areas. It is also possible to set up groups for classes, although this part of the site doesn’t seem to have been taken up particularly by users so far.

The first module covers genetics but there are plans to focus on other areas in the future. The sections so far added are:

• Chromosomes and Cytogenetics
• Evolutionary Genetics
• Gene Expression and Regulation
• Gene Inheritance and Transmission
• Genes and Disease
• Genetics and Society
• Genomics
• Nucleic Acid Structure & Function
• Population and Quantitative Genetics

It will be interesting to see how it develops.

Elsevier Downtime

Science Direct and 2collab will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance for approximately eight hours starting at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday 10th of January.

Symbiosis

Symbiosis is a service offered by Brechin based professional wildlife photographer Niall Benvie. He is "is keen to foster partnerships with field biologists, scientists, researchers and educators by providing web-resolution photographs from the Images from the Edge collection free of charge for PowerPoint presentations and research papers posted on the Web."

The website is irritating to use and you will have to allow pop-ups from it, but he does have over 3000 stunning images available.

Academia

Academia.edu is an interesting social networking site that allows academics to add information about themselves and their research interests and display subject and institution relationships in a hierarchical tree format with links to other researchers. There are 32 people on it so far from the University of St Andrews.

(Via Peter Godwin's blog.)