scholarly journals A Standards Organization for Open and FAIR Neuroscience: the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility

Author(s):  
Mathew Birdsall Abrams ◽  
Jan G. Bjaalie ◽  
Samir Das ◽  
Gary F. Egan ◽  
Satrajit S. Ghosh ◽  
...  

AbstractThere is great need for coordination around standards and best practices in neuroscience to support efforts to make neuroscience a data-centric discipline. Major brain initiatives launched around the world are poised to generate huge stores of neuroscience data. At the same time, neuroscience, like many domains in biomedicine, is confronting the issues of transparency, rigor, and reproducibility. Widely used, validated standards and best practices are key to addressing the challenges in both big and small data science, as they are essential for integrating diverse data and for developing a robust, effective, and sustainable infrastructure to support open and reproducible neuroscience. However, developing community standards and gaining their adoption is difficult. The current landscape is characterized both by a lack of robust, validated standards and a plethora of overlapping, underdeveloped, untested and underutilized standards and best practices. The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF), an independent organization dedicated to promoting data sharing through the coordination of infrastructure and standards, has recently implemented a formal procedure for evaluating and endorsing community standards and best practices in support of the FAIR principles. By formally serving as a standards organization dedicated to open and FAIR neuroscience, INCF helps evaluate, promulgate, and coordinate standards and best practices across neuroscience. Here, we provide an overview of the process and discuss how neuroscience can benefit from having a dedicated standards body.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathew Abrams ◽  
Jan G. Bjaalie ◽  
Samir Das ◽  
Gary F. Egan ◽  
Satrajit S Ghosh ◽  
...  

There is great need for coordination around standards and best practices in neuroscience to support efforts to make neuroscience a data-centric discipline. Major brain initiatives launched around the world are poised to generate huge stores of neuroscience data. At the same time, neuroscience, like many domains in biomedicine, is confronting the issues of transparency, rigor, and reproducibility. Widely used, validated standards and best practices are key to addressing the challenges in both big and small data science, as they are essential for integrating diverse data and for developing a robust, effective and sustainable infrastructure to support open and reproducible neuroscience. However, developing community standards and gaining their adoption is difficult. The current landscape is characterized both by a lack of robust, validated standards and a plethora of overlapping, underdeveloped, untested and underutilized standards and best practices. The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF), established in 2005, is an independent organization dedicated to promoting data sharing through the coordination of infrastructure and standards. INCF has recently implemented a formal procedure for evaluating and endorsing community standards and best practices in support of the FAIR principles. By formally serving as a standards organization dedicated to open and FAIR neuroscience, INCF helps evaluate, promulgate and coordinate standards and best practices across neuroscience. Here, we provide an overview of the process and discuss how neuroscience can benefit from having a dedicated standards body.


2020 ◽  
pp. 108-116
Author(s):  
Jill S. Barnholtz-Sloan ◽  
Dana E. Rollison ◽  
Amrita Basu ◽  
Alexander D. Borowsky ◽  
Alex Bui ◽  
...  

Cancer Informatics for Cancer Centers (CI4CC) is a grassroots, nonprofit 501c3 organization intended to provide a focused national forum for engagement of senior cancer informatics leaders, primarily aimed at academic cancer centers anywhere in the world but with a special emphasis on the 70 National Cancer Institute–funded cancer centers. Although each of the participating cancer centers is structured differently, and leaders’ titles vary, we know firsthand there are similarities in both the issues we face and the solutions we achieve. As a consortium, we have initiated a dedicated listserv, an open-initiatives program, and targeted biannual face-to-face meetings. These meetings are a place to review our priorities and initiatives, providing a forum for discussion of the strategic and pragmatic issues we, as informatics leaders, individually face at our respective institutions and cancer centers. Here we provide a brief history of the CI4CC organization and meeting highlights from the latest CI4CC meeting that took place in Napa, California from October 14-16, 2019. The focus of this meeting was “intersections between informatics, data science, and population science.” We conclude with a discussion on “hot topics” on the horizon for cancer informatics.


Author(s):  
Tim Bartley

Activists have exposed startling forms of labor exploitation and environmental degradation in global industries, leading many large retailers and brands to adopt standards for fairness and sustainability. This book is about the idea that transnational corporations can push these rules through their global supply chains, and in effect, pull factories, forests, and farms out of their local contexts and up to global best practices. For many scholars and practitioners, this kind of private regulation and global standard-setting can provide an alternative to regulation by territorially bound, gridlocked, or incapacitated nation states, potentially improving environments and working conditions around the world and protecting the rights of exploited workers, impoverished farmers, and marginalized communities. But can private, voluntary rules actually create meaningful forms of regulation? Are forests and factories around the world being made into sustainable ecosystems and decent workplaces? Can global norms remake local orders? This book provides striking new answers by comparing the private regulation of land and labor in democratic and authoritarian settings. Case studies of sustainable forestry and fair labor standards in Indonesia and China show not only how transnational standards are implemented “on the ground” but also how they are constrained and reconfigured by domestic governance. Combining rich multi-method analyses, a powerful comparative approach, and a new theory of private regulation, this book reveals the contours and contradictions of transnational governance.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 1106-1131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yazan Khalid Abed-Allah Migdadi ◽  
Abeer Ahmad Omari

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify the best practices in the green operations strategy of hospitals. Design/methodology/approach A total of 25 cases from all over the world were investigated. The source of data was the annual sustainability reports that were retrieved from Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) database. The present research adopted the benchmarking method and the quantitative content analysis of sustainability reports. Then, the indicative models of best practices were developed by using two analysis approaches; within cluster analysis and across clusters analysis. Findings This study found four major taxonomies of green operation strategy in hospitals. The significant strategic groups were resources/waste management; electrical power management; non-hazardous waste management; and emissions/resources management. Indicative models for the relationship between actions and key green performance indicators were developed in the two stages of the analysis. Originality/value The best practices of green operations strategies in hospitals have not so far been investigated. Countries around the world should obey the new regulations for their environmental footprint; if they do, it will exert pressure on all sectors and organizations at all levels to take immediate steps to measure and improve their environmental performance.


Author(s):  
Sergey Bushuyev ◽  
Denis Bushuiev ◽  
Victoria Bushuieva ◽  
Olena Verenych

The problem of creating effective models, methods and tools for strategic management of projects and programs for the development of organizations in the transition to a circular economy. Global trends in the development of organizations prove that the world is transforming with acceleration. The life cycle of knowledge and technologies for managing complex projects and programs is significantly reduced. The technical and technological complexity of organizational development projects increases due to innovations. These trends create significant challenges in the development of project management systems and programs for the formation of a circular economy in Ukraine. This is especially true of projects and programs in conditions of uncertainty about the impact of COVID 19 and anticipation of a global crisis after a pandemic. Today, the application of proven best practices (benchmarking) is no longer a way forward. Forming a vision, goals and strategy for the implementation of organizational development projects in advance makes our actions rigid, not flexible. When creating a project or program begins with focusing on what is valuable to our customers and the country, it is enough for us to use best practices. But the complexity and innovative orientation of development projects of organizations in the transition to a circular economy creates a number of challenges. One of the answers to these challenges is cost-effective work on project management and development programs, taking into account the trends of transition to a circular economy. Project management teams learn to distinguish between what is valuable and what doesn't matter, this is the path that management methodologies have taken for decades. A number of projects have taken the first steps in implementing the necessary cost-effective / flexible transition that supports sustainability and adaptability to turbulent environmental changes. In the conditions of modern destructive economic relations in the world community the problem of a choice of strategy of projects as drivers of development of the organizations is vital. One of the key approaches to the development of the EU is the transition to a circular economy with maximum utilization of both waste products and projects, and the disposal of project products after the end of product life cycles.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 5-11
Author(s):  
Muzaffar Nurbaev ◽  

The world community will turn into a common international system. States, which are a separate independent part of this universal system, develop in all spheres in interaction, interdependence and interdependence. Each individual state can benefit from the best practices of another state in the field of political, legal, legislative and state building.Naturally, the study of the experience of foreign parliamentarism is of great importance for Uzbekistan, which democratically restructures its political and legal system and moves towards the formation of a bicameral legislature through parliamentary reforms. Over the past two hundred years of the historical development of parliamentarism, an incredibly rich and meaningful experience has been accumulated. No matter how diverse the diversity in this regard, comparing the activities of existing parliaments on the planet, it will be possible to identify all important aspects, common features and features of this state-legal phenomenon. The essence, traditions and general laws of parliamentarism can be understood by comparing the legislative practice that has developed in advanced countries with the procedures formed in them. At the same time, it should be noted that a number of rare works have been published based on a comparison of the experience of different parliaments


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Cosima Meyer

ABSTRACT This article introduces how to teach an interactive, one-semester-long statistics and programming class. The setting also can be applied to shorter and longer classes as well as introductory and advanced courses. I propose a project-based seminar that also encompasses elements of an inverted classroom. As a result of this combination, the seminar supports students’ learning progress and also creates engaging virtual classes. To demonstrate how to apply a project-based seminar setting to teaching statistics and programming classes, I use an introductory class to data wrangling and management with the statistical software program R. Students are guided through a typical data science workflow that requires data management and data wrangling and concludes with visualizing and presenting first research results during a simulated mini-conference.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. e0248128
Author(s):  
Mark Stewart ◽  
Carla Rodriguez-Watson ◽  
Adem Albayrak ◽  
Julius Asubonteng ◽  
Andrew Belli ◽  
...  

Background The COVID-19 pandemic remains a significant global threat. However, despite urgent need, there remains uncertainty surrounding best practices for pharmaceutical interventions to treat COVID-19. In particular, conflicting evidence has emerged surrounding the use of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, alone or in combination, for COVID-19. The COVID-19 Evidence Accelerator convened by the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA, in collaboration with Friends of Cancer Research, assembled experts from the health systems research, regulatory science, data science, and epidemiology to participate in a large parallel analysis of different data sets to further explore the effectiveness of these treatments. Methods Electronic health record (EHR) and claims data were extracted from seven separate databases. Parallel analyses were undertaken on data extracted from each source. Each analysis examined time to mortality in hospitalized patients treated with hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and the two in combination as compared to patients not treated with either drug. Cox proportional hazards models were used, and propensity score methods were undertaken to adjust for confounding. Frequencies of adverse events in each treatment group were also examined. Results Neither hydroxychloroquine nor azithromycin, alone or in combination, were significantly associated with time to mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. No treatment groups appeared to have an elevated risk of adverse events. Conclusion Administration of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and their combination appeared to have no effect on time to mortality in hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Continued research is needed to clarify best practices surrounding treatment of COVID-19.


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