Category Archives: In the News

HathiTrust now has Over Five Million Open Books and Harvard has a new Default Waiver for their DataVerse!

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Those are the two big social science and humanities news items in this installment of Blog Buzz.

Milestones:HathiTrust Reaches 5 Million Open Volumes was posted this past Saturday by Gary Price over at InfoDocket. Price links several times to a gloriously chart-and-stat-packed post from Mike Furlough, Executive Director of the HathiTrust entitled Getting to Five Million:HathiTrusts Collection of open books, as well as an earlier post from the Scholarly Kitchen on the topic. Price also points out that the HathiTrust, whose 5 millionth open book (courtesy of Ohio State University) is a treatise by King George III’s dentist, may not be the only online resource with the potential to give us insight into the monarch’s teeth — not for long anyway, as plans were recently announced by the Royal Archive to digitize 350,000 pages of source material from the Georgian period (the bulk of which is from George III’s Reign.*)

Furlough’s post is well is worth the read for those interested in the long term preservation and accessibility of library collections. In addition to the graphs and data (with links to even more data) he provides important explanations (the difference between Public Domain and Open Works) and insights on how closed copyrighted works in HathiTrust will still be of use to researchers.

The second big announcement (via Kaitlin Thaney of Mozilla Open Science) is that in Harvard’s Dataverse (from the Institute of Quantitative Social Science), “a software application that enables institutions to host research data repositories” (more about the project here), has changed the default waiver for datasets added to the system to CCo or public domain, and will give researchers the option to change the waiver for given datasets if necessary. The announcement on their blog is here.

*Attempt to remain calm, historians of the American Revolution and Georgian Period, this could take a little while.

It is so exciting to think about all work people will be able to do with this information for both HathiTrust and Dataverse!

Songs4Sloan Benefit Concert for Pediatric Cancer Research at MSK and More…

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  • On May 11 at 7pm at the Soho Playhouse (15 Vandam Street) in New York City, many of Broadway’s youngest stars will be performing as part of Songs4Sloan, a benefit concert presented by Abbey Rose Gould and Presley Ryan to benefit pediatric cancer research at MSK.
  • On April 12, MSK’s Patricia Skarulis delivered a keynote address at the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives spring forum in Chicago. MSK’s ever-evolving cybersecurity strategy was discussed, which currently includes a two-factor authentication for email and various initiatives to reduce the risk of having employees fall prey to increasingly sophisticated phishing schemes.
  • In an April 14 Annals of Internal Medicine paper, MSK’s Dr. Andrew Vickers, PhD, and Dr. David Kent of Tufts Medical Center argued that there may be a need for more individualized recommendations when it comes to screening and prevention as most individuals have below average risk and may experience more harm than benefit from unwarranted screenings.
  • From April 22-24, MSK will be the meeting site for a workshop hosted by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC). In attendance will be 100 international experts on small cell lung cancer who will discuss the current state of knowledge in this field with the goal of developing a “roadmap for future research and clinical trials for patients with this disease”.

Dr. Lowy, Dr. Varmus, Cold Spring Harbor’s New Partner and More…

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Here are a few highlights of cancer research news that have recently caught my attention:

  • Douglass Lowy has been named the Acting Director of the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Lowy’s areas of expertise includes: cancer biology papilloma viruses, preventive vaccines, and tumor suppressor genes. For more on his career.
  • New York Times writer Sabrina Tavernise recently interviewed Dr. Harold Varmus, former director of the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Varmus shared his thoughts on the state of cancer research and future trends.
  • Recently 60 Minutes on CBS aired a segment on a “miracle” treatment for glioblastoma which involves injecting the polio virus into the brains of patients. The study is currently being conducted at Duke. In response to the CBS piece, contributor Arlene Weintraub shared her thoughts in an article in Forbes.

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