The Open Science Prize: enabling discoveries for health

The Open Science Prize has been launched by the Wellcome Trust, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to unleash the power of open content and data to advance biomedical research and its application for health benefit.

The Prize encourages technology experts and inventive researchers to submit innovative ideas for services, tools, and platforms that will make it easier for scientists, innovators and the wider public to discover, access and re-use the digital information being generated through health research. The aim of the Open Science Prize is also that of promoting international collaborations for the development of solutions that can benefit the global research community.

The competition consists of two phases and the opportunity to receive a prize of $230,000.

The deadline for entries is 29 February 2016.

For more information visit https://www.openscienceprize.org/.

Federica Fina
(Research Data Management)

BMC Ecology image competition

CC BY Catherine Markham http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12898-015-0053-9

Each year BMC Ecology runs an image competition designed to allow ecologists to capture in a single frame their personal perspective on the 'beauty and mystery of our natural surroundings'. These images also provide a window into their specific research area:

'Ecologists can then educate as they draw attention to some of the outstanding science being done, while featuring their research efforts in a visual, and fun, way.' BMC Ecology

The overall winning image entitled “Palestinian sunbird female forages on Echinops sp.” was captured by Mohamed Sheb from the Suez Canal University Ismailia, Egypt.

CC BY Mohamed Shebl http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12898-015-0053-9.

There were 9 winning pictures, and an additional 23 that were highly commended. We highly recommend taking a look. All the pictures are published under a CC BY attribution licence so sharing them couldn't be easier too. All the pictures were published as part of an editorial here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12898-015-0053-9

Here's some more!

CC BY Kainaat William http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12898-015-0053-9.

CC BY Kenneth J. Chapin http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12898-015-0053-9.

Share My Thesis competition - update

Last week the British Library Ethos service announced the winner of the Share My Thesis competition. We posted about the competition back in January, see here for more information.
 
The entrants had to first tweet about why their research is/was important using the #ShareMyThesis hashtag. The 8 shortlisted entrants then had to write a short article to elaborate on their tweet. You can read the winning entries here: 1st, 2nd, and 3rd.

Although the competition is now closed, the British Library Ethos service still encourages PhD students past and present to use #ShareMyThesis to share their PhD research with a wider audience.

EThOS #ShareMyThesis competition now open!

Copyright © The British Library Board

The British Library EThOS service has started a Share My Thesis competition (in collaboration with Vitae and Research Councils UK).

How to enter:
Entry for the competition is through twitter using #ShareMyThesis. Entrants must explain in a single tweet why their doctoral research is important.

The fine print:
Entrants must have either completed their PhD degree or be currently studying for a PhD. Equivalent degrees such as DPhil are also allowed. Entrants must only tweet once, and also ensure that their tweet is understandable to a lay audience.The full terms and conditions can be found here.

The next stage of the competition will see the authors of the best 8 tweets write a short article elaborating on what they wrote previously, explaining in more detail why their research is important. This article will be in the style of a blog post no more than 600 words long.

First prize is a 15" retina display MacBook Pro! Second prize is an iPad, and third is a £200 Amazon voucher.

The closing date for entering your tweets is 9th February 2015 at 10am.

A bit about EThOS: The British Library EThOS service aims to increase visibility to UK doctoral research theses by compiling records of all UK doctoral theses in one database. It also offers free access to the full text of as many theses as possible either by links to institutional repositories (such as our own) or directly through the EThOS database. EThOS also offers a digitisation on demand facility where users can request that a thesis be scanned and uploaded to the database. EThOS will then contact the corresponding institution and request that a copy be sent for digitisation. Many St Andrews theses have undergone this process, and we have found that many older theses have found a new lease of life afforded by the greater degree of visibility. The benefits of the EThOS service were perfectly presented in a previous blog post by a postgraduate work experience student Maja, so rather than repeat her words, I'll simply suggest you have a read of her post.

Open Access Week - Meme Competition

Knowledge Unlatched, the crowd-funded open-access e-books pilot, has started a fantastic meme competition in celebration of Open Access week. Just go to the Knowledge Unlatched webpage, select one of the 5 memes, add your caption, save, then email the link to info@knowledgeunlatched.org (above is the Open Access team's attempt).

There are 5 pictures to choose from, including:

The prize for the competition is having your meme published on the Knowledge Unlatched website as well as a donation to Book Aid International in you name.

Why not have a go yourself!

The competition closes on the 26th of October, so get your meme in quick!

Keep up-to-date with Knowledge Unlatched and other e-resources news over on the @thelibrary blog

Taylor & Francis APC Competition

Good news, we have a competition to share!

For the past 2 years Taylor & Francis have conducted a worldwide survey of journal authors' views on Open Access (you can read more about the survey results in a previous blog post). Now the publisher has started a competition to encourage greater engagement with the published survey data.

The publisher is offering a prize of an APC (Article Processing Charge) waiver to the person who makes the most insightful use of the survey data. Effectively, this represents a prize of £1788!

To enter, email your findings to delveintodata@tandf.co.uk or alternatively tweet a link to the findings to @TandFOpen. Entry closes on the 26th of October, so not much time left!

Admittedly the prize is not applicable to everyone - it's also not transferable and there is no cash alternative :(  However, it is still very worthwhile taking a look at the survey data as it gives a real insight into prevailing opinions and also how opinions have changed over the past year.

Are your opinions mirrored by the worldwide academic community*? Why not find out!

*Note that because T&F publishes more Social Sciences and Humanities titles than Science and Technology, the results could be considered biased towards these disciplines.