There is an urgent need to improve the infrastructure supporting the reuse of scholarly data. A diverse set of stakeholders—representing academia, industry, funding agencies, and scholarly publishers—have come together to design and jointly endorse a concise and measureable set of principles that we refer to as the FAIR Data Principles. The intent is that these may act as a guideline for those wishing to enhance the reusability of their data holdings. Distinct from peer initiatives that focus on the human scholar, the FAIR Principles put specific emphasis on enhancing the ability of machines to automatically find and use the data, in addition to supporting its reuse by individuals. This Comment is the first formal publication of the FAIR Principles, and includes the rationale behind them, and some exemplar implementations in the community.

developing countries would have access to the information they needed to provide the most effective health care possible with the resources available. The world was at the cusp of the information age: information and communication technologies would mean that lack of access to reliable relevant information would no longer be a barrier to effective health care. Although other factors such as lack of drugs and infrastructure might hinder provision of health care, this would not be the case with information.What then has been achieved in the past 10 years? What have we learnt? And if providing access to reliable information is the single most cost-effective and achievable strategy for sustainable improvement in health care, 2 what steps can we now take to bring us nearer to health information for all (panel)? What has been achieved?Important progress has undoubtedly been made. Information and communication technologies are increasingly available; more and better content is available to a growing number of people, especially those in tertiary hospitals, academic institutions, and urban settings; there are more and better free resources on the internet; there is a larger and wider range of healthinformation support programmes; an international community has evolved that is committed to improving health-care information, with governments and other bodies in developing countries playing an increasingly active part; and politically, access to health-care information has become a key international development issue. Equitable and universal access to health-care information is recognised in the latest draft of WHO's World Report on Knowledge for Better Health 3 as an important part of worldwide strategies to reduce global disparities in health and to achieve the health-related Millennium Development Goals.Progress has been patchy, both geographically (with sub-Saharan Africa generally falling far behind most other regions) and across different health sectors (specialist and academic health care is much better served with information than rural primary care), and overall there is little if any evidence that the majority of health professionals, especially those working in primary health care, are any better informed than they were 10 years ago. The few empirical studies we identified 4-7 and many anecdotal reports suggest that lack of physical access to information (absent, slow, or unreliable internet connectivity, expensive paper, and high subscription cost of products) remains the major barrier to knowledge-based health care in developing countries.However, there are now many successful initiatives that could be extended or replicated. An example is BIREME (http://www.bireme.org), the Latin American Can we achieve health information for all by 2015?Fiona Godlee, Neil Pakenham-Walsh, Dan Ncayiyana, Barbara Cohen, Abel Packer Universal access to information for health professionals is a prerequisite for meeting the Millennium Development Goals and achieving Health for All. However, despite the promises of the informati...

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WikiProteins enables community annotation in a Wiki-based system. Extracts of major data sources have been fused into an editable environment that links out to the original sources. Data from community edits create automatic copies of the original data. Semantic technology captures concepts co-occurring in one sentence and thus potential factual statements. In addition, indirect associations between concepts have been calculated. We call on a 'million minds' to annotate a 'million concepts' and to collect facts from the literature with the reward of collaborative knowledge discovery. The system is available for beta testing at http://www.wikiprofessional.org.A preview of the version highlighted by WikiProfessional is available at:

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BackgroundThe journal Impact factor (IF) is generally accepted to be a good measurement of the relevance/quality of articles that a journal publishes. In spite of an, apparently, homogenous peer-review process for a given journal, we hypothesize that the country affiliation of authors from developing Latin American (LA) countries affects the IF of a journal detrimentally.Methodology/Principal FindingsSeven prestigious international journals, one multidisciplinary journal and six serving specific branches of science, were examined in terms of their IF in the Web of Science. Two subsets of each journal were then selected to evaluate the influence of author's affiliation on the IF. They comprised contributions (i) with authorship from four Latin American (LA) countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico) and (ii) with authorship from five developed countries (England, France, Germany, Japan and USA). Both subsets were further subdivided into two groups: articles with authorship from one country only and collaborative articles with authorship from other countries. Articles from the five developed countries had IF close to the overall IF of the journals and the influence of collaboration on this value was minor. In the case of LA articles the effect of collaboration (virtually all with developed countries) was significant. The IFs for non-collaborative articles averaged 66% of the overall IF of the journals whereas the articles in collaboration raised the IFs to values close to the overall IF.Conclusion/SignificanceThe study shows a significantly lower IF in the group of the subsets of non-collaborative LA articles and thus that country affiliation of authors from non-developed LA countries does affect the IF of a journal detrimentally. There are no data to indicate whether the lower IFs of LA articles were due to their inherent inferior quality/relevance or psycho-social trend towards under-citation of articles from these countries. However, further study is required since there are foreseeable consequences of this trend as it may stimulate strategies by editors to turn down articles that tend to be under-cited.

operacional do ScielO e assessor de Informação e comunicação em ciência da Fundação de Apoio à Unifesp.Os periódicos brasileiros e a comunicação da pesquisa nacional RESUMO Os periódicos brasileiros ocupam espaço e função importantes na comunicação da pesquisa científica nacional e são publicados majoritariamente em acesso aberto com alta visibilidade e acessibilidade. Além de publicarem mais de um terço dos artigos indexados internacionalmente com afiliação brasileira, os periódicos brasileiros contribuem para equacionar a comunicação multilíngue da produção científica particularmente nas áreas do conhecimento com centralidade nacional. O seu desenvolvimento futuro projeta-se como uma linha de ação estratégica nas políticas de apoio à pesquisa brasileira. essa presença marcante é contrastada pelo desempenho médio muito inferior ao obtido pelos periódicos dos países desenvolvidos, medido em número de citações recebidas por artigo. Tal desempenho afeta o impacto da pesquisa brasileira como um todo. embora parte desse desempenho seja devido aos fatores clássicos que influenciam a prática das citações, como idioma de publicação, área temática e colaboração internacional, o aperfeiçoamento dos periódicos brasileiros requer políticas públicas que contribuam para superar suas limitações.Palavras-chave: periódicos brasileiros, artigos científicos, comunicação, pesquisa. ABSTRACT Brazilian journals occupy an important space and play an important role in imparting scientific research.Published mainly in open-access format, they enjoy high visibility and accessibility. Besides publishing over one third of the articles by authors affiliated to Brazilian institutions which are indexed in international databases, Brazilian journals contribute to balancing the multilingual communication of scientific production, mainly in leading knowledge areas in the country. Its future development emerges as a strategic agenda of policies geared towards supporting Brazilian research. Such noteworthy presence is contrasted by a poor average performance, much lower than that of journals in developed countries, measured by the number of citations each article receives. Such performance affects the impact of Brazilian research as a whole. Although that performance is due partially to the classical factors influencing the practice of citations, such as the language in which the article is published, theme area and international cooperation, improving Brazilian journals demands public policies to help overcome their limitations.

SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library on Line, www.scielo.bireme.br) is a program aimed at offering a core of Brazilian Scientific Journals in an open access mode at internet. This initiative has been followed by other Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian countries. Along with the development of the open accessed electronic library, a complementary scientometric/bibliometric database has been set up which permit to retrieve citation data of more than 40,000 articles. The robustness that this database has now achieved allows one to make important studies which were not possible before, using only the international Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) database.