Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to leverage public data because they either cannot locate or cannot access the
data or the data may not be of suffi ciently high quality. To date there are rela-
tively few examples of using public domain data for research while literature
data are more commonly used for the development and testing of computa-
tional ligand-based models [60, 61]. We believe that there need to be even
greater efforts to demonstrate what can be achieved in regards to using litera-
ture data for model development.
There remain many questions to answer. Even when there is suffi cient
confi dence in public domain data, how will researchers mesh public domain
and precompetitive data into internal systems? Also, what are the legal chal-
lenges of protecting data such that they minimize hurdles for data that could
be released to the public?
Getting people to collaborate and share data is a signifi cant challenge. It is
hard enough to coordinate such efforts inside an organization, so what is the
payoff or cultural shift that needs to occur in order to have people participate
in open collaborations across organizations? Is it human nature that most will
focus on one's own research interests? We should be actively training the next
generation of scientists to be more collaborative and use the various software
systems that are available to facilitate this. The ultimate goal of collaborative
software and tools is to speed up decision-making processes and enhance con-
nectivity between scientists. Such tools may be useful for those involved in
alliance management or needed for managing collaborator or researcher
networks.
Many other issues could have been covered in this volume, but we are
restricted by lack of space as well as the pace in this area of collaboration and
affi liated technologies as it is very much a moving target. In the future there
will be new and improved ways of getting biomedical researchers to collabo-
rate, as yet not identifi ed. Our present efforts are sure to represent only col-
laborative software for biomedical research version 1.0. There are, of course,
many opportunities to address for version 2.0. These are exciting times.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Stephan Schürer acknowledges funding from the National Institutes of Health for the
BAO project described in “Ontologies and Collaborations” (RC2 HG005668).
REFERENCES
1. Williams AJ. Crowdsourcing, collaborations and text mining in a world of open che-
mistry. 2008 . Available: http://www.slideshare.net/AntonyWilliams/crowdsourcing -
collaborations- and - text - mining - in - a - world - of - open - chemistry - presentation .
2. Williams AJ. Internet - based tools for communication and collaboration in chemis-
try . Drug Discov Today 2008 ; 13 : 502 - 506 .
Search WWH ::




Custom Search