Our portfolio company BioRAFT, today announced they have entered into an agreement with Stanford University to acquire the ChemTracker brand and intellectual property.

Through this agreement BioRAFT will be able to integrate ChemTracker‘s powerful chemical safety and regulatory information database with BioRAFT’s enterprise solution and user-friendly interface. Development will begin immediately on a ChemTracker module within BioRAFT.

Nathan Watson, President and CEO of BioRAFT says:

“ChemTracker is a leader in chemical inventory and regulatory reporting. We are honored that Stanford University and the ChemTracker team decided that BioRAFT will be a worthy steward of their incredible work. BioRAFT is about simplicity and integrated safety for scientists, so we are delighted to announce this acquisition as the first of many investments BioRAFT will be making in our commitment to delivering powerful chemical safety and research support tools.”

The BioRAFT solution for laboratory safety is comprised of the BioRAFT Platform—an application infrastructure and data hub—and application modules that range from laboratory inspections to training management, biosafety registration, radioisotope management, facilities management and chemical safety. BioRAFT provides an enterprise-wide safety solution for research institutions and life science companies that consolidates information and activities under one umbrella. BioRAFT will bring ChemTracker’s advanced chemical database, chemical inventory functionality, and reporting capabilities into the BioRAFT solution as a fully-integrated application.

Larry Gibbs, Associate Vice Provost at Stanford University adds:

“Stanford EH&S is excited to be working with BioRAFT. The original vision for ChemTracker, developed at Stanford over 20 years ago, has been to evolve into a comprehensive and integrated EH&S system for research and teaching laboratories. With the planned migration of the ChemTracker programs into the BioRAFT Platform, that original vision will now be realized. BioRAFT has a well-developed system for laboratory environments, and with the incorporation of the ChemTracker chemical inventory system, BioRAFT will provide an even more robust and comprehensive solution for scientists and EH&S professionals.”

ChemTracker Consortium members will continue to use their software and will continue to receive support and account management through ChemTracker. BioRAFT is working closely with the ChemTracker team on plans for the new software and a transition strategy for customers and members of the ChemTracker Consortium.

The post BioRAFT Announces Plan to Integrate ChemTracker IP 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.

“Santa’s elves always practice safe sleigh maintenance, just like researchers practice safe science with BioRAFT!”

More tales you never knew about BioRAFT…CEO Nathan Watson is very into home DIY – his attention to construction safety always prevents any smashed fingers or toes. CTO Ben Benone ran a flying club at University and took his future wife on a flying date when they first met. His love of planes might be where he got so good at building safety inspection and training systems! To date, 158,740 lab safety and training courses have been run in BioRAFT.

The post Santa’s Elves Always Practice Safe Sleigh Maintenance #digiscixmas appeared first on Digital Science.

I loved Calculus in high school; I also excelled in Chemistry.  In comparison, Biology was not for me.  I could not conceptualize how a cell consisted of so many parts. It took me years to realize my discomfort stemmed from how I process information – the subject that I had been so uncomfortable with in high school ended up being my love in university. Why? A senior level Fermentation Engineering course gave me the means and mechanisms to understand basic Biology. Suddenly, a world of opportunity opened up and I was no longer unsure of myself and my capabilities.

“…fear of the unknown is a reason used for justifying an unhappy career path.”

We have a tendency to discard subjects that cause discomfort. It’s important to identify what it is about the subject that makes us uncomfortable.  For example, social influences can have an early impact on career choice.  In my case, familial experience in pharma influenced my choices for postgraduate studies.  In hindsight, I wonder why I didn’t take a more direct path to where I ended up.  I thrived in my undergraduate years with programming languages and also during work placements involving software, but stubbornly pushed myself back into the world of Chemical Engineering because that was my major.

I measured my early successes by how closely I adhered to my field of study; I worried that in the long term, I would not be able to compete with people studying Computer Sciences and Software Engineering – fear of the unknown is a reason used for justifying an unhappy career path.

For a brief time, I was that person who became burnt out, locking myself within the walls of an unhappy career. On paper, I looked successful – but internally I was bored and overworked – my advice is to stand up to those fears and identify where the discomfort lies. Find like-minded people to create your social influences and start chipping away.

“On paper, I looked successful – but internally I was bored and overworked – my advice is to stand up to those fears and identify where the discomfort lies.”

Identify the risks – what will you lose? 

Often the risk is financial or locative, but there are ways to take a step in the direction without burning bridges e.g. learning new skills; joining a special interest group or volunteering on a project.  After a long career in the sciences, I turned to freelance website creation in my off-hours.  I started attending workshops, conferences, and meet-ups featuring like-minded individuals; one night, I met the folks at BioRAFT.  They were intrigued by my diverse background in academia, pharma, and software and they welcomed me into their crucible!

Diliny Corlosquet is Senior Product Manager at BioRAFT, the provider of integrated laboratory safety and research management software solutions. She holds two degrees in Chemical Engineering, BASc, MASc, and a Masters of Science specializing in regenerative medicine. She has also worked as a Front-End Drupal Web Developer. Diliny is a mother of two and lives in the Greater Toronto Area with her geek husband and two Labrador retrievers.

The post The Discomfort Puzzle – Career Advice #WiSTEMspotlight appeared first on Digital Science.

BioRAFT have a busy schedule of conferences and webinars coming up! Let us fill you in on their activities.

The first webinar coming up is titled, “BioRAFT: Organize Your Institution for Research Safety in 2016” and is taking place on February 17th. In this webinar you will learn what’s new in the BioRAFT solution for 2016. From inspection enhancements to laboratory hazard registration, to IBC registration upgrades and equipment management improvements, BioRAFT has been making strides to provide customers with the best possible solution for laboratory safety, compliance, and training.

The second webinar is titled, “The New View: Tools for Engineering a Stronger Lab Safety Culture” and is taking place on March 2nd. Safety professionals in diverse industries around the world use the New View to improve communication and safety in their organizations, so why not bring this methodology to lab safety? In this free Webinar, speakers Dave Christenson and Ron Gantt will teach you the philosophy behind the New View, what it is capable of accomplishing, and how you can go out and begin to make it work for you.

After completing this webinar, you will:

• Understand what the New View is and how it improves communication and safety.
• Learn why industries like nuclear power rely on the New View.
• Be able to use the New View to assess your safety culture.
• Have the tools to build trust in your organization.
• Receive practical suggestions on how to start using this methodology in your institution.

From February 24th to 26th BioRAFT will be in 2016 CSHEMA California Regional Conference at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. The conference is being held to learn and discuss a variety of topics and best practices in the EHS Safety field, to engage EHS Safety professionals on college and university campuses, to discuss existing issues on your campus and to network with other EHS Safety colleagues.

The post BioRAFT: Webinars and CSHEMA California! appeared first on Digital Science.

For me, the change this year in Digital Science was mirrored in a profoundly personal way when, in July, I was invited to take on the role of Managing Director. As I’ve said to others recently, having worked closely with my predecessor, Timo Hannay, for many years, being asked to take over from this leadership was a mix of excitement and trepidation somewhat akin to the feeling you have if you’ve ever been given the keys to the beloved sports car of a friend or relative.Many of our notable achievements relate directly to helping researchers and those who support them to be more recognised for what they do, more efficient at what they do, and to be more innovative or more open. So, although a little indulgent, I hope you won’t mind this post looking back on some of the “good bits” of 2015.

This year has seen greater recognition of our consultancy team led by Jonathan Adams, who produced a series of insightful and illuminating analyses and visualisations. These include: two Digital Research Reports; the delivery of the REF impact case studies database for HEFCE and the associated collaboration with the Policy Institute at Kings College London over the analysis of these data; and, an interactive collaboration network and comment piece produced with colleagues at our sister company SpringerNature for the Nature Index.

One of the most significant innovations from Digital Science in 2015 has been GRID, our Global Research Identifier Database, which we launched in October. “Open” is important at Digital Science and so we were pleased to be able to make the core GRID dataset available openly on Figshare under a CC-BY licence. Originally, built in-house to support our portfolio companies and internal requirements, GRID contains 50,000 institutional names that are all derived from public lists and publicly funded grants in an automated manner with manual curation to provide a high-quality dataset. GRID includes unique, persistent identifiers and geo-location information across 212 countries. The database can be used to clean up or merge different datasets and allows the technically minded to do some really cool visualisations of data such as the Global Institutional Collaboration Network, generated from PLOS ONE data, which you can see below.

Across Digital Science and the portfolio, we attended more than 50 conferences on 5 continents. We hosted 20 of our own events including Digital Science Showcases in Melbourne, Wellington, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and London as well as  our regular Spotlight events, Ada Lovelace Day, OpenCon Satellite events, Symplectic’s ever popular conferences in London, Melbourne and Boston; Altmetric’s 2AM conference and Figshare’s inaugural Figshare Fest. Look out for a chance to see us in 2016 – we always want to hear about new challenges and new ways to help you.

Our Catalyst Grant programme has continued to grow and we received a record number of innovative submissions in 2015! This presented us with the difficult but exciting task of selecting the winners. We are proud to have awarded Catalyst Grants to both TetraScience and Ada Lovelace Day. I am confident that we will see great things from them as they continue to develop.

Highlights from across our portfolio

At the heart of Digital Science are the portfolio companies and it would be remiss to look back at 2015 and not to highlight some of the product enhancements, collaborations and successes from their perspectives:

• Over the last 12 months, Altmetric has served more than 2.92 billion API requests and has supported at least 8 research articles. Altmetric continues to diversify and lead the movement around article-level credit and is now tracking attention around articles in The Conversation as well as including mentions from ClinicalTrials.gov study records. Altmetric partnered with Springer to launch Bookmetrix, a book and chapter-level attention platform. Sara Rouhi, Product Sales Manager at Altmetric, received the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s 2015 Emerging Leader Award.
• BioRAFT dramatically expanded its customer base in both the academic and private sector research markets with new customers and expanded services for existing customers. BioRAFT was another Digital Science company to see significant expansion in its team, with the addition of a new Director of Sales and more staff in development, product management, professional services, sales and marketing. In response to recent lab safety scares (some of which even made the mainstream news) BioRAFT released 12 new subversions of its application, which included functionality driven and informed by its customers that enhance laboratory inspections and streamline the biosafety registration and hazard tracking processes.
• Figshare launched the next generation of their research data management platform. An exciting milestone in the usage of Figshare.com by the academic community saw the number of public articles on the site exceed 2,000,000, of which 500,000 are datasets. There are more than 5,000 citations to the articles in Figshare. Among many partners who chose to work with Figshare this year some of the most exciting content came from The American Chemical Society, the Geological Society and the VIVO Conference. Figshare was also recognised as a “Cool Vendor 2015” by Gartner and were ifinalists in the UK IT Industry Awards 2015 for the “Best use of Cloud Services” award, for their innovative work with Loughborough University and Arkivum.
• Labguru diversified functionality and with it the clients with whom they partner. Large institutions adopting Labguru for all their researchers now include Jackson Laboratories and AstraZeneca 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 2016 so do look out for them on their travels!
• Overleaf hit the three million projects mark in July! If you printed all those papers, the stack would be as wide as Pluto (the planet, not the dog!). The Overleaf team has tripled in size and is now working with more than 80 Overleaf advisors around the globe. Through partnerships in the publishing industry, Overleaf is now in a position to provide manuscript submission links to over 10,000 journals across all fields! No surprise with all this activity that Overleaf received a Highly Commended in the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing and John Hammersley, co-founder, was named as one of The Bookseller’s Rising Stars for 2015.
• ReadCube continued its success with over 15.3 million users reading, discovering and managing their content libraries. That translates to more than 133 million articles being read in Readcube for a total of 634 years of reading time! The NPG content sharing initiative, powered by ReadCube technology, celebrated its first anniversary. ReadCube now partners with more publishers than can be mentioned in this post! You can read their full list in the ReadCube year in review…
• Symplectic had a very busy year, introducing three new modules, an enhanced integration with Figshare’s institutional offering and a brand new integration with UberResearch’s Dimensions product. They also added SSRN as a new data source, much to the delight of social science researchers. Rather impressively, Symplectic’s Open Access Monitor has already been adopted by over 25 of Symplectic’s institutional clients and the recent launch of their new Impact Module generated a lot of interest in the UK. Symplectic continues to attract a lot of attention from across the globe and 2015 saw Elements launched at the University of Georgia, Symplectic’s largest ever implementation.
• ÜberResearch, having only started their company two short years ago, showed impressive steps forward. The Dimensions database now includes more than 1.9 million grants worth more than $918 billion from over 150 funders globally. More than $236 billion of that funding is currently live and being spent today. This gives a unique insight into the research that is being done right now. Last year was the first full year that Dimensions was available to clients with more than 50 signing up, amongst them some of the largest funders in the world.

On top of all this Martin Szomzor, our Head of Data Science, Mark Hahnel, founder of Figshare and Euan Adie, founder of Altmetric, were all named in Information Age’s list of 2015’s top data leaders and influencers.

Here’s to all of the teams and portfolio companies at Digital Science and wishing the best to all of you for 2016!

The post 2015: A Year of Change, Growth and Innovation appeared first on Digital Science.

The video gives you lots  more information on why their software matters to research organizations. BioRAFT’s specific expertise is in research and laboratory management and they do pride themselves on their knowledge and experience in the research community – which certainly exudes from this video!

Guided by a management team that understands researchers and how laboratories and research centers operate, the end result is an intuitive application that even the most uncompromising PI or research executive will use and value.

To learn more about BioRAFT, you can also watch their founder story here.

For even more viewing pleasure, you can also watch all of our previous Founder Story videos too: Labguru, ÜberResearch, Figshare, Altmetric, Symplectic and Overleaf.

The post BioRAFT Explained In A Helpful New video! appeared first on Digital Science.

David Costa is the Marketing Manager of BioRAFT, a Digital Science portfolio company and the provider of integrated laboratory safety and research management software solutions.

Prior to joining BioRAFT, David worked as the Director of Marketing and Public Relations for several non-profit companies. David has a degree from the University of Massachusetts in Writing and Education and a Masters of Science from Simmons College.

A couple of weeks ago, America celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  I spent my day off from work thinking about what a great humanitarian Dr. King was, but also about all the other “special” days we celebrate.  It seems as if there is a special day for everything.

So, I did a little research.  Did you know that there are over 50 annual special days that are recognized by presidential proclamation?  In addition, there are over 60 days Americans celebrate that are not presidentially recognized.  These days consist of everything from Star Wars Day to Ice Cream For Breakfast Day.

It got me thinking.  Why is there no Researcher Day?

I understand that everything can’t be a Federal holiday or observed by presidential proclamation, but isn’t researchers’ contribution to humanity worthy of even an unofficial day?  At the very least, there isn’t one person on earth who hasn’t benefitted from taking an aspirin or cold tablet.  Why do we think Record Store Day and CAPS LOCK DAY are more important than celebrating researchers?

To be fair, the National Postdoctoral Association recently celebrated its fifth annual National Postdoc Appreciation Week (NPAW).  Although I applaud their efforts, NPAW doesn’t pertain to all researchers, just a subset of researchers.  Why not celebrate all researchers, from graduate students to researchers who have been at the bench for years?

2014 headlines were filled with high-profile near misses at federally funded research laboratories.  We couldn’t help but be reminded of how researchers put themselves at risk on a daily basis.  Don’t these heroes deserve a day?  Isn’t recognizing the people who devote their lives to fighting cancer and AIDS, or those who’ve enhanced our lives with better technology more important than having ice cream for breakfast?

Official or unofficial, regarding researchers I say, let’s show appreciation to those who truly deserve it and  “call it a day.”

This post can be found on the BioRAFT blog.

The post Let’s Call It a Day appeared first on Digital Science.

David Costa is the Marketing Manager of BioRAFT, a Digital Science portfolio company and the provider of integrated laboratory safety and research management software solutions.

Prior to joining BioRAFT, David worked as the Director of Marketing and Public Relations for several non-profit companies. David has a degree from the University of Massachusetts in Writing and Education and a Masters of Science from Simmons College.

Positive thinking is not just for optimists anymore. Research is now beginning to show that positive thinking increases brain performance. In the book, Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life, Dr. Paul Hammerness, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, and co-author Margaret Moore, an executive wellness coach, claim that positive thinking improves the brain’s function and focus. On the other hand, negative thinking sabotages our brains’ problem solving abilities and makes ignoring distractions difficult.

Barbara L. Fredrickson, a positive psychology researcher at the University of North Carolina, has published several manuscripts revealing the benefits of positive thinking. In What Good Are Positive Emotions? (1998), Fredrickson introduced the broaden-and-build theory. This theory outlines how positive emotions not only broaden people’s attention and thinking, but also enables them to draw on higher-level connections and gain a larger range of ideas.

Fredrickson conducted an experiment to test the impact positive emotions had on the brain. Fredrickson divided up her test subjects and showed them different films and images. Some images produced thoughts of joy, while others produced thoughts of fear and anger. Participants were then asked to imagine themselves in a situation and write down what they would do. Those who saw negative images had the fewest number of responses and ideas. Participants who saw positive images had a significantly higher number of thoughts and actions.

Could positive thinking help researchers be safer? Fredrickson’s studies suggest that researchers who saw the “glass as half full” would be equipped with clearer attention and thinking, possibly proactively avoiding mishaps or at the very least better able to deal with accidents when they happen.

Take incident reporting for example. Although incident reporting helps organizations drive proper training, getting researchers to report incidents can sometimes be a challenge. Researchers fear mishaps will make them look incompetent or that they will get in trouble for mistakes. Ian Sample, science editor of The Guardian, recently wrote,

“a culture of blame makes people hide their mistakes and crucial lessons go unlearned.”

If one were to flip the script and develop a “Safety Saves” system where one could report how injuries or accidents were prevented by proper procedures or protective equipment, could there be a spike in safety compliance?

Recently the National Academy of Sciences declared September to be National Biosafety Stewardship Month, encouraging organizations to focus on biosafety practices. I attended a conference where institutions gathered together and discussed their issues around safety and compliance. Everyone shared their issues and commiserated, but no one shared ideas or positive things they’ve accomplished.

What would happen if we turned our focus from being what we’re doing wrong to what we’re doing right? Would celebrating our safety practice victories rather than bemoaning our pitfalls and challenges, help develop a stronger safety culture? Could seeing the glass as “half full” actually keep researchers safer?

Just think…if we were all willing to adopt a more positive attitude, what’s the best that could happen?

This post originally appeared on the BioRAFT blog here.

The post Can Seeing the Glass Half Full Keep Researchers Safer? appeared first on Digital Science.

An environment, health & safety program is only as good as its participation and compliance, so how can you get more out of your communications? In this free webinar, the panelists will discuss how they have bridged the gap between environment, health & safety and the people they serve with creative ideas for communication.

Panelists:
• Mary Beth Koza (UNC): How to leverage your EHS Annual Report to train and inform scientists.
• Christina Aguilera (UC Denver): Hosting a safety fair to expose personnel to programs, practices, and resources.
• Eric Rouse (UKY): Using themes and creative communications to create interest and memorable impact on personnel, research staff, and others.

This webinar is part of the “Laboratory Safety Leadership Series” of webinars, hosted by BioRAFT. These non-commercial webinars bring best practices and new ideas in laboratory safety to the scientific community.

Register Online: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6014764374182126081

The post BioRAFT Webinar: Marketing Your Environment, Health & Safety Programs appeared first on Digital Science.