“There are an exploding number of innovative independent features and services that are designed to enhance scientific and scholarly publishers’ core online platform.  Rather than integrating them one-by-one we organized the Silverchair Universe to create a fast and centralized way to bring publishers and partners together. The Silverchair Universe is essentially the ‘App Store’ of the Silverchair Platform.”

said Silverchair Chief Product Officer Jake Zarnegar.

Silverchair Universe partner features are proactively incorporated into standard page templates and site configuration tools, allowing Silverchair to offer efficient activation for standard integrations (even DIY activation) and thus eliminating common hurdles and delays.

The Silverchair Universe program includes specific qualification criteria for independent products and service partners in the areas of security, performance, accessibility, and more—ensuring that each partner meets the core requirements of publishers.

The expansive coverage area of the Silverchair Universe includes content enrichment, marketing, advertising, analytics and business intelligence, author services, discovery and linking, e-commerce, archiving, content sharing, authoring, and more.

The initial group of Silverchair Universe partners include a collection of our portfolio companies:Altmetric, Figshare, ReadCube, PeerWith, & ÜberResearch. 

Our companies join GVPi, Hypothesis, Meta, PaperHive, Redlink, Remarq, ScholarlyIQ, TrendMD, Unsilo and Zapnito.

To find out more you can read the official press announcement here.

The post Digital Science Portfolio Companies to Become Silverchair Universe Partners appeared first on Digital Science.

Dimensions is powered by our portfolio  company ÜberResearch and contains information on over $1 trillion USD of funded research projects from over 250 funders around the world, along with linked publications data and reviewer finder functionality. Publishers can use the platform to explore trends, track research activity over time, and gather the latest information on funded projects.

Hannah Heckner, Manager, Product Development at AAAS says:

“We’re really excited to dig into the data that Dimensions provides. We were impressed with the way ÜberResearch have worked with funders to gather this valuable resource, and will be using these insights to enhance our understanding of the global research landscape.”

ÜberResearch Co-Founder Steve Leicht adds,

“Dimensions has a wealth of information and functionality that AAAS can use to really make a difference to their business. We’re really pleased to have them on board and look forward to working together to help them gather actionable business intelligence.”

You can read the official announcement over on theÜberResearch blog.

The post Dimensions Database Adopted By AAAS To Gather Global Funded Research Insights appeared first on Digital Science.

Our VP of Publisher Business Development, Betsy Donohue, was part of a session aimed at communicating the newest and most innovative products affecting our industry. She delivered a five-minute lightning presentation on Dimensions for Publishers and showed how it provides all of the global grant data that publishers have been missing to support editorial, product development, and sales strategy decisions.

The concept of her talk was so well received that we have illustrated her presentation below and featured it on Figshare for people to download.

The post Seeing the Bigger Picture With Dimensions for Publishers appeared first on Digital Science.

Register

When selecting new reviewers and experts to assess the potential of funding applications, it can be difficult to gain a comprehensive understanding of the vast number of potential experts available. Often, you return to the same well of researchers that you’ve been using for years. When using ÜberResearch’s Dimensions for Funders, you can seamlessly navigate across millions of expert profiles that are precisely matched to applications allowing you to effectively identify new, qualified reviewers.

The Dimensions Reviewer Finder tool supports the review process through the ability to build committees, manage bulk assignments, find reviewers for niche areas, and screen for conflicts of interest.

In addition to finding reviewers, NIH, Nature publishing, and hundreds of organizations around the world also use Dimensions to identify experts for:

• Applicants to target for RFAs/RFPs
• Potential collaborators for their applicants and grantees
• Conference speakers and panelists
• Co-funding opportunities
• New scientific advisory board members

The Finding Reviewers with Dimensions webinar will address these topics and is geared towards CSOs, VPs of research, program officers, and grant operations staff.

Register

The post Webinar: Finding Reviewers With Dimensions appeared first on Digital Science.

Limited NIH Funding For Public Health Law Research May Present Barriers To Evidence-Based Policymaking

The National Institutes for Health (NIH) has supported public health law research, but not to the extent necessary to timely evaluate laws affecting the public’s health, according to a new study published today in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice.

The proportion of funding represented only 0.25 percent of the 2014 NIH budget, up from 0.08 percent at the beginning of the study period in 1985.

These percentages equate to about $17.6 million between 1985-1999, and nearly $261 million between 2010-2014. By comparison, NIH’s total grant funding in 2010-2014 was almost $105 billion.

The researchers, from CPHLR and ÜberResearch in Cambridge, Mass., examined trends in funding according to institute and topic area across nearly 7,500 NIH grants funded between 1985 and 2014.

“We know that timely, rigorous evaluations of how laws influence health are key to shaping evidence-based policy. We wanted to know the extent to which our nation’s leading funder of health research — the National Institutes of Health — supports this kind of work,” said lead author Jennifer K. Ibrahim, PhD, MPH, associate director of the Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research (CPHLR) and associate dean of research at the Temple University College of Public Health.

The study finds that NIH funded 510 individual research grants for public health law research (PHLR) that empirically examined health law policymaking, the implementation of health laws, or the health effects of laws or enforcement and implementation practices.

The top agencies funding PHLR were roughly consistent over the 29-year study period:

1. National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA): 145 grants
2. National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA): 105 grants
3. National Cancer Institute: 81 grants
4. Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development: 68 grants
5. National Institute of Mental Health: 42 grants

The most common focus areas for funding mirror the top funding agencies’ agendas and the most pressing public health issues during that time, including: alcohol, drugs, environmental health, HIV/AIDS, mental health, obesity, social disparities, tobacco and transportation.

“NIH and other funders are and could continue to be indispensable in helping policymakers, health practitioners, and the public understand how law can affect public health, especially during a time when public health resources are in decline,” Ibrahim explained. “We are heartened that the funding seems to steadily increase, but without improved strategies from NIH, legal action affecting the population will continue to go unevaluated for years.”

The authors also note that funding is an important driver for continuing to build the field of public health law research, and suggest that educational initiatives and a growth in PHLR training programs could also continue to support researchers who evaluate the effects of law on PHLR and other health areas.

You can watch a brief video conversation between authors Jennifer Ibrahim and Scott Burris below:

The post Funding Is An Important Driver For Continuing To Build The Field of Public Health Law Research In The USA appeared first on Digital Science.

In this annual update to the pilot report on global Arctic funding published in 2016, and using insights from grants database Dimensions, the authors studied data from over 250 funders for the period 2007-2016 to determine the extent to which research in the field is being supported.

Key findings include:

• Roughly ⅓ of all global Arctic research presented in this data is undertaken by UArctic member institutions.
• Arctic Council Observer states provide about 0.5% of their total research funding to Arctic research, compared to 7% on average for member states.
• The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science is now the biggest funder, by number of grants, in Dimensions, with over 800,000 records – 354 of which are focused on Arctic research. Japan is the second most active Observer Country of the Arctic Council, following the UK.
• RFBR remains the top funder, by number of funded projects, related to Arctic (3,035) in the ten year period (2007-2016), followed by NSF-GEO and NSERC.
• The largest proportion of Arctic research funding falls under the Earth Sciences, with many attributed to Oceanography.

For the first time, the report also includes data from all major Danish funders, who collectively contributed funding for over 280 projects across disciplines, and Danish institutions who are doing Arctic research.

Speaking about the report, lead author Igor Osipov, Senior Research Fellow at FEFU and Chair of the UArctic Research Analytics Work Group, commented,

“We’re really pleased to have been able to incorporate insights from Denmark into the annual update of the analysis. Danish funding plays a big part in many of the Arctic research projects that are being conducted today, and being able to showcase their contribution was an important aspect of this report.”

Co-author Giles Radford, Head of Professional Services at ÜberResearch, adds,

“As we continue to add new funding data into the Dimensions database, our data around Arctic research continues to become more robust. Research priorities can change and we hope to monitor and report annually to show how funding for research into the Arctic landscape changes over time.”

You can download the report here.

The post International Arctic Research: Analyzing Global Funding Trends appeared first on Digital Science.

OnPAR is the Online Partnership to Accelerate Research and was originally launched in March 2016 by the Leidos Life Sciences team, in partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

OnPAR offers a new funding paradigm with the goal of matching highly scored, unfunded grant applications with potential non-government funding organizations. ÜberResearch will contribute key capabilities from the Dimensions platform, providing pertinent global funding landscape data alongside its unique natural language processing (NLP) matching tool that routes relevant grant applications to funders.

Martin Dueñas, Director, Health Research Management Practice, Leidos Life Sciences says:

“ÜberResearch provides critical information for funding organizations and is a natural partner for OnPAR.” 

OnPAR with Dimensions will provide a global research knowledge management platform that will empower funding organizations and private industry to make more informed strategic investments. In addition, the data mining tools and analytics within OnPAR with Dimensions will facilitate greater perspective, and insight previously unavailable, by linking research projects and literature that were never before recognized as relevant, ultimately furthering advances in research discovery and development.

Dr. Duane Williams, Vice President of ÜberResearch adds:

“We are thrilled to partner with Leidos in support of the OnPAR effort. Dimensions will provide additional information including a broad view of the global research landscape to facilitate more informed research investment decisions.” 

You can read the official news over on the ÜberResearch website here.

The post ÜberResearch Partners with Leidos To Add Global Research Funding Landscape To OnPar appeared first on Digital Science.

This publication is the first in a series aimed at utilizing Altmetric data to provide a more nuanced understanding of how the announcements of new medical discoveries affect the wide-range of disease-specific stakeholders including researchers, funders, care providers, and patients.

Altmetric Attention Scores are a weighted count of the volume of attention a research article has received, intended to reflect the likely visibility and reach of the publication amongst audiences both within and beyond academia.

The research team was led by Prof. Bastiaan R. Bloem, Medical Director of the Parkinson Centre Nijmegen (ParC), a Dutch center of excellence for Parkinson’s disease. Bloem commented,

“Our paper opens up a fascinating discussion about how we should define the quality of good research. Traditional and widely accepted metrics are based on citations and judgement by peers in the field. But the world is changing fast, with lay people now having an unprecedented ability to offer their own feedback on issues that were previously reserved for experts.” He continues “Our paper highlights the fact that science is no exception, and that discussions about research papers in social media such as Twitter and Facebook offer a new dimension of scientific quality, by reflecting how important and societally relevant new research findings might be. It was exciting to see how the new ‘altmetrics’ largely overlapped with traditional measures of quality, but also offered complementary insights.”

First author on the paper, Dr. Rui Araújo, a neurology resident in the Department of Neurology in the Centro Hospitalar e Universitário de Coimbra (PT), elaborated,

“There seems to be a correlation between altmetrics and conventional metrics, but notable exceptions occur. Institutional leaders who are serious about understanding how research affects the world should be aware of publications with high Altmetric Attention Scores, regardless of whether they come from discoveries made internally or by competing groups.”

Aaron Sorensen, ÜberResearch’s Senior Scientometrics Analyst, and Stacy Konkiel, Altmetric’s Director of Research & Education, led the team from a data-science perspective. It was Sorensen’s idea to make the Parkinson’s analysis the first of a series:

“My hypothesis is that the degree to which the root cause of a given disease is understood and the degree to which that disease is treatable will have a big impact on the kinds of medical discoveries which generate the greatest online attention. Using the same methodology we employed for Parkinson’s, our plan is to study other neurological disorders to determine whether there are disease-specific factors which explain any observed differences in the type of biomedical research most likely to receive a high Altmetric Attention Score.”

The results are published in this paper in the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease. Launched in 2011, the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease is dedicated to providing an open forum for original research in basic science, translational research and clinical medicine that will expedite our fundamental understanding and improve treatment of Parkinson’s disease.

The post Parkinson’s Disease Research Papers with the Highest Altmetric Attention Scores appeared first on Digital Science.

With over $1trillion in awarded research grants, Dimensions provides unique insights into the research that will be done in the near future, enabling you to provide higher quality decision support tools for your researchers.

The Dimensions team would like to invite you to an upcoming webinar to introduce you to the new platform, its capabilities and many uses, including:

• Seeing the most recent funded research projects in any research field
• Finding potential collaborators and topic experts
• Getting information to help new grant applications, by knowing what has been funded recently

Join us on Thursday 9 Feb
3:30pm GMT / 10:30am EST

#DimensionsWebinar

REGISTER NOW

Join us to see this innovative tool first hand, and to learn more about how providing access for your faculty can bring huge benefits for research within and beyond your institution.

If you have any questions please get in touch. A recording of the webinar will be sent to all those who cannot join the live event.

The post Join Our Webinar: Introducing the New Dimensions Module for Researchers appeared first on Digital Science.

During the turmoil of 2016 Digital Science made a decision as to what type of business we wanted to be in the future. The decision was in no way out of step with who we were or who we always wanted to be, but 2016 seemed to make it all the more important to say it and to ensure that it is known. We not only want to be a business that grows and gives back to the broad research community from which it came, but we also want to embody the culture of our colleagues in research. Digital Science is  a place where anyone can work, regardless of their country of origin, regardless of their gender, faith, sexuality or any other appropriate diversity criteria. Lots of companies have such things written in their company handbook, but embracing these ideas and really making them part of the DNA of the business is another thing. It means finding innovative solutions to tough problems around hiring; it means committing to visa applications and to supporting people who want to move to work with other talented people; it means reviewing policies that have stood for a number of years and really looking hard to see if there is a way to make some things fairer.

In 2016, Digital Science turned six years old, but I hope that we also reached a different level of maturity as a company. It’s difficult to describe Digital Science as a startup anymore but from the energy of staff in the company, the will to do things professionally yet pragmatically and cleverly, the belief in our mission to improve the experience of researchers in their work, it is difficult to see how we’ve fundamentally changed from the startup that we were six years ago. I think that the main change I’ve seen is that we feel an even greater responsibility than ever “to do the right thing”. It’s difficult to put into words what that really means, but improving our professional services at the centre of Digital Science is important; ensuring that when any of the portfolio companies releases a new version of their product, the attention to detail is staggering; the time spent working with clients to really understand their problems and the willingness of clients to spend time with our teams is gratifying.

Below, you’ll read about the fantastic year our portfolio companies have had. Here, I just wanted to mention a couple of successes within the broader Digital Science community. Digital Science completed investments into TetraScience and Transcriptic, two exciting new startups in the US, each of which is well placed to change the way that labs work in the future. We published four Digital Research Reports, collaborated with Figshare and Springer Nature on a report on the State of Open Data, released the Digital Research Yearbook at the Royal Society in October, produced a white paper on the “New Research Data Mechanics” and worked with the UArctic collaboration to show how much work is being done on “Arctic Science”.

As we look forward to 2017, the amount of exciting and innovative projects just seems to multiply (perhaps slightly alarmingly to those on the team here at Digital Science)…

The Digital Science team wishes you all the best for 2017…keep watching this space!

Highlights from our portfolio

Altmetric

2016 was a big year for Altmetric with lots of new partnerships, projects and announcements! The year started with Summon discovery service adding Altmetric badges to their database. NISO announced the new Data Quality Code of Conduct for altmetrics in February which both Euan and Jean had a hand in putting together. Our first partnership of the year came in March with IEEE adding Altmetric badges into their Xplore Digital Library. We announced the very first Altmetric Research Grant in March which was awarded to Dr Lauren Cadwallader, Open Access Research Advisor at the University of Cambridge, in June. Our first major update to our functionality came in April when Altmetric data for Books was added to the Explorer. Later that month we partnered with Figshare giving users the ability to see Altmetric data on their database. Our summer began with the launch of our next big functionality update: the inclusion of Scopus Citations to details pages in the Altmetric Explorer. In July we had two more major integrations with the announcement that Profiles RNS and ÜberResearch added Altmetric badges to their databases. In September we added Syllbus data from the Open Syllabus Project to the Explorer showing where individual books had been included in Syllabi in over 4,000 institutions worldwide. Our biggest milestone of the year was the release of Version 2 of the Explorer for Institutions in September which features a completely revamped user experience including new visualisations, reporting and searching features. Our last big partnerships of the year were with Pubmed Central and IOP Publishing, both integrating Altmetric data. As always we finished the year with our Top 100 list of the most discussed research of the year with none other than President Barack Obama at the top spot!

BioRAFT

With over 160,000 safety training courses delivered to scientists worldwide through BioRAFT, 2016 was a great year for safety and for the BioRAFT team. In addition to adding new life sciences, higher education, and medical device customers, BioRAFT kept its ongoing promise to the community to continually improve its suite of software and services. We released major enhancements to our IBC Biological Registration, Inspection, and Equipment Modules, and implemented powerful new dashboards that provide real-time, actionable data for EHS and for leadership across our customers’ organizations. BioRAFT also continued to be a major supporter of the EHS community through our thought leadership series and sponsorship of industry events: we hosted major educational webinars including one on The New View, a methodology for building safety conscious organizations, and attended 21 conferences/symposia. Of course, this all was accomplished by our amazing team, which increased by fifty percent in 2016, working closely in collaboration with our passionate and dedicated customers. We can’t wait to see what we will accomplish together in 2017!

Figshare

Whilst 2016 was not everyone’s favourite year, from our point of view it was the most successful across a variety of measures. We now have over 3 million public articles, with 26 million page views, 7.5 million downloads and over 10 thousand citations. This year was spent building some great new features including Collections, Public Projects, Altmetric & Github integration, curation workflows, reporting and statistic dashboards, new file viewers and a number of search and discovery enhancements. We announced over 20 new partnerships with institutions and publishers including Amsterdam University, Royal Society Publishing, Springer Nature and Carnegie Mellon University, to name a few. Understanding the importance of working with the research community, we attended and spoke at conferences in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Africa, North America and Europe. We also expanded our community conference figshare fest, holding four events around the world – many more to come in 2017. In partnership with Digital Science and Springer Nature we published the first, “State of Open Data report” featuring the results of a survey of over 2,000 researchers on their attitude to data publishing featuring contributions from thought leaders all over the world. We look forward to an even better 2017!

GRID

During the first year we released the GRID database to the public, we added over 17,000 new records through manual curation, three new external identifiers to make it easier to link out to other datasets, and released our own RDF version of GRID for download to help out our linked data enthusiasts. We have already planned a host of exciting new improvements for the upcoming year. We are looking into increasing coverage of our current external identifiers, especially Wikidata IDs, as well as including some new ones to our already comprehensive coverage. Most importantly, we decided to further support the open data community in 2017 by making changes to the GRID license and going CC0, making it even easier to use in conjunction with other open datasets and software.

Labguru

This year at Labguru we have diversified functionality with our clients and partners, including an improved Samples table for experiments. Large institutions continue to adopt Labguru, as well as a number of academic research institutions, biotech companies and government labs across the US, the Netherlands, France and Australia. The Labguru team will be out on a number of road trips in 2017 so do look out for us.

Overleaf

2016, Wow!  What a year full of growth and excitement at Overleaf. We’re happy to share that as of the end of 2016, Overleaf has over 500,000 registered users, and over 6,000,000 documents have been created using Overleaf. That’s a lot of work and brain-power! We have 175 advisors promoting and supporting Overleaf around the world; over 20 institutional partnerships – and more to announce in early 2017; and over 20 publishing partnerships – which includes hundreds of journal authoring templates and simplified, 1-click submission links. Our authors can now write, collaborate, and submit to a number of journals with 1 click, directly from Overleaf! We have happily posted 64 blog articles; reached 33,398 Twitter followers and tweeted 1,265 nuggets of gold! We thank all of our incredible users and supporters – and we’re fired up to continue the incredible fun and momentum in 2017!

ReadCube

As 2016 winds down – we wanted to take this opportunity to send our most sincere thanks to all of our users, partners, collaborators, and colleagues for being part of the ReadCube & Papers family. This year, we surpassed all of our goals, and we could not have done it without your support. While there were many special moments this year – here are some of our favorites…

• Over 40 million people used ReadCube and Papers technology to read, discover and manage their literature in 2016! That is almost three times as much since last year!
• 219 million articles were read in ReadCube this year! That’s over 611,000 each day!
• Our readers spent over 1534 years’ worth of time reading in ReadCube in 2016 which is almost 4.4 years reading each day!
• Over 52 million articles are now available as Enhanced PDFs within ReadCube’s web, desktop and mobile applications.
• We have partnered with another 15 publishers and industry partners for a total of over 85 to date! New partners this year include: HighWire Press, Ingenta Connect, Taylor & Francis, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, The Geological Society of London, The Electrochemical Society and Liverpool University Press.

You can check out all the highlights in our end of year rundown via http://rdcu.be/n7jV and stay tuned for updates on all the exciting projects planned for the upcoming year via @readcube

Symplectic

Symplectic has had an exciting year in which we turned 13 years old! Our team managed three successful conferences, in Cambridge (UK), Melbourne, and Duke (Durham, NC). Elements v5.0 was released to rapturous critical acclaim, with a new UI and Assessment Module. We launched a new hosting service, with uptake from institutions around the world, and released a popular open-source ‘Bootstrapped’ VIVO theme at the VIVO conference in Denver. Symplectic now have clients in 2/3 of the THE World Top 25 Universities!

TetraScience

2016 has wildly exceeded TetraScience’s expectations. Our customer base has grown 5x, network 6x, and revenue 10x. One of our main highlights was launching a new product, TetraScience Utilization, further delivering on our vision to provide a deep and dynamic mission control for R&D labs. These accomplishments are directly attributed to the hard work of our phenomenal team. With loftier ambitions in 2017, we hope to add 10 members to our team in Q1 alone across multiple functions (engineering, marketing, operations, and sales).

ÜberResearch

The third year of operations for ÜberResearch saw lots of exciting developments, in several different directions. The Dimensions database brought in many new sources, bringing the new total to over 3.4 million projects from 250 funders, and more than $1 Trillion of funding! The addition of new funding sources will continue into 2017 and beyond, and forms the backbone for not just Dimensions for Funders, but also the recently launched Dimensions for Publishers, as well as a new Dimensions interface for researchers coming in early 2017. 2016 also saw the integration of the Altmetric attention score into Dimensions for clients who use both platforms – bringing an extra splash of colour to the publications data in Dimensions with the Altmetric donuts!

The post 2016: A Year of Global Investments, Grants and Growth appeared first on Digital Science.