Sharing data is good. But sharing your own data? That can get complicated. As two research communities who held meetings in May on the issue report their proposals to promote data sharing in biology, a special issue of Nature examines the cultural and technical hurdles that can get in the way of good intentions.

An "Aha!" moment or event indicates a change in the cognitive state. I first heard about this concept from Frank Ohl and Henning Scheich, former colleagues, but recently also found it in the Wall Street Journal: A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight, which serves as a better introduction. These moments need an environment in which they can flourish. As far as my moments are concerned, they come—surprisingly—reliably but only if I write about my work with the reader in mind. Most of my articles changed quite dramatically in the process of writing, although I used to start writing, only when I thought the creative work is seemingly finished. I learned nothing could be more wrong. So for me being engaged in making my work more transparent by writing about it at an earlier stage, while it is still in progress, is nothing less than forcing insight.

The Science Collaboration Framework (SCF) is a software toolkit to establish web-based virtual team organizations for researchers in biomedicine. It enables researchers to publish and discuss on-line content such as articles, news, and perspectives, and to provide shared semantic context for this content using established scientific vocabularies and automated text mining.

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Access to scholarly information in the disciplines of education and medicine occurred primarily through the simultaneous development of two bibliographic databases. The Education Resource Information Center (ERIC) originated as a resource designed to be comprehensive in its inclusion of peer-reviewed and unpublished literature for the entire education community. MEDLINE began as a resource of selective materials for physicians and researchers. Today, ERIC includes selected peer-reviewed literature directed primarily to researchers and practitioners, although others use the database, while MEDLINE is a vast information system serving all health professionals and consumers. This literature analysis of their policy history shows important differences in their evolution.

"Hi, welcome to my Blog. I’m Simon Coles, co-founder and CTO of Amphora Research Systems, and this is just a simple blog of stuff related to Electronic Lab Notebooks and anything else that comes to mind. I’ve been doing ELNs for over 13 years now, and have experience of a wide variety of ELN implementations, so I hope there will be something here for everyone."

So how do you deal with competitors, people who want you to fail, in an open, transparent, and collaborative system