The White House rolled out an Executive Order and Open Data Policy yesterday, announced in a press release. There are 400,000 data sets from government agencies available, and the memorandum requires agencies to “create information…using machine-readable and open formats”. Visit DATA.gov and check out Under the Hood of the Open Data Engine for more on how you can get started using this new resource.

Over at the Digital Shift, there’s a piece on the Data Curation Profiles Directory, developed at Purdue to track how academic libraries are managing the explosion of research data sets.

From MLA this year, Eric Schnell wrote about the possibility of using the “flipped classroom” model at future conferences in Flipping the MLA Conference, and it is clear in the comments that others were thinking the same thing.  This is an interesting idea for how everyone can get more out of conferences by digesting the material beforehand and discussing it on-site with colleagues.

And finally, some Friday fun from a fellow MSKCC staff member…
https://twitter.com/caitlin_hool/status/332840676771364865

The KevinMD blog this week included content about continuing problems related to scientific publication that are of  interest to our readers:

The first is Your Librarian Can Protect You Against Predatory Publishers, from fellow librarian Dina McKelvy, who discusses the problem of unscrupulous publishers and open access publishing scams. This issue was covered on our blog last year in Authors Beware…, but it remains a concern and is something authors should be aware of. If you have any questions about a particular journal or regarding open access, don’t hesitate to ask us, we are here to help!

A second problem topic from KevinMD is Planting Drug Industry-Funded Papers in Medical Journals, by Martha Rosenberg, regarding research published in medical journals that has been written by drug companies or authors receiving funding from them.

Finally, for those following reports about the forthcoming DSM-5 diagnostic manual of mental disorders or interested in mental health research funding, Vaughan Bell writes that the National Institute of Mental Health is moving away from DSM categories.