Biomedical databases on the web

Hundreds of biomedical databases are scattered around the web and now BioMed Central has created a page listing them in more than 40 categories. The databases are from a variety of large organizations and individual research groups. The categories include:

  • Bioinformatics (202 databases)
  • Cell Biology (73)
  • Genetics (446)
  • Genomics (476)
  • Medical Imaging (6)
  • Molecular Biology (287)
  • Plant Biology (129)
  • Proteomics (86)
If you have a database you'd like to have listed on this page, send the information to BioMed Central at databases@biomedcentral.com.

UCB support for open access authors

UC Berkeley's Vice-Chancellor for Research and the University Librarian are co-sponsoring a pilot project supporting Berkeley researchers who want to make their publications freely available to the public. The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative – BRII – was announced on January 21st, 2008. According to the BRII website:

The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) supports faculty members who want to make their journal articles free to all readers immediately upon publication.

An 18-month pilot program, BRII will subsidize, in various degrees, fees charged to authors who select open access or paid access publication. The pilot will also yield data that can be used to gauge faculty interest in — as well as the budgetary impacts of — these new modes of scholarly communication on the Berkeley campus.

More information can be found at the BRII website at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/brii/. Visit the UC Berkeley Library's Scholarly Communication page to learn more about Open Access publishing.


Student competition at Berkeley: $140K in prizes

Big Ideas @ Berkeley and the Berkeley student government (ASUC) recently announced the third annual Bears Breaking Boundaries contest. According to the website:

[The two organizations] are teaming up with a variety of research centers and institutes on the campus to organize a series of “idea competitions” that will encourage student teams to propose the next generation of research, education, and service activities on the UC Berkeley campus.

The deadline for most of the competitions is April 14, 2008, though some competitions have earlier deadlines. The competitions fall into the following areas:

For more information, including Rules and Guidelines and Past Winners, see the contest website.