Key Factors Affecting User Adoption of Open-Access Data Repositories in Intelligence and Security Informatics: An Affordance Perspective

Rich, diverse cybersecurity data are critical for efforts by the intelligence and security informatics (ISI) community. Although open-access data repositories (OADRs) provide tremendous benefits for ISI researchers and practitioners, determinants of their adoption remain understudied. Drawing on affordance theory and extant ISI literature, this study proposes a factor model to explain how the essential and unique affordances of an OADR (i.e., relevance, accessibility, and integration) affect individual professionals' intentions to use and collaborate with AZSecure, a major OADR. A survey study designed to test the model and hypotheses reveals that the effects of affordances on ISI professionals' intentions to use and collaborate are mediated by perceived usefulness and ease of use, which then jointly determine their perceived value. This study advances ISI research by specifying three important affordances of OADRs; it also contributes to extant technology adoption literature by scrutinizing and affirming the interplay of essential user acceptance and value perceptions to explain ISI professionals' adoptions of OADRs.

Bat Roosts in Rock

This guide provides descriptions of when the species of bats resident in British and Ireland use natural and man-made rock habitats, how they use them, and the environment each species occupies within them. This data is part of the Bat Rock Habitat Key project. For the first time it brings together a) historic scientific investigations; b) useful photographic accounts; and c) open access biological records, in a practical narrative. The text encompasses: - Descriptions of the features that a climber, caver or professional ecologist might encounter on and in natural and man-made rock habitats, and within which bats have been recorded roosting. - Recording criteria for both the physical and environmental attributes of different features and situations. - The identification of suitability thresholds against which the recorded information can be compared to assess the likelihood that a specific feature might be exploited by a specific bat species. - Some suggestions for how to avoid mistakes and misery when performing a survey. The idea is that the use of the book will generate standardised biological records that will feed into the online database at www.batrockhabitatkey.co.uk. This data will be analysed to search for patterns that can increase the confidence in the suitability thresholds, build new roost features that deliver the environment each species really wants; their fundamental niche on each environmental gradient.

Challenges in Bioinformatics Workflows for Processing Microbiome Omics Data at Scale

The nascent field of microbiome science is transitioning from a descriptive approach of cataloging taxa and functions present in an environment to applying multi-omics methods to investigate microbiome dynamics and function. A large number of new tools and algorithms have been designed and used for very specific purposes on samples collected by individual investigators or groups. While these developments have been quite instructive, the ability to compare microbiome data generated by many groups of researchers is impeded by the lack of standardized application of bioinformatics methods. Additionally, there are few examples of broad bioinformatics workflows that can process metagenome, metatranscriptome, metaproteome and metabolomic data at scale, and no central hub that allows processing, or provides varied omics data that are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). Here, we review some of the challenges that exist in analyzing omics data within the microbiome research sphere, and provide context on how the National Microbiome Data Collaborative has adopted a standardized and open access approach to address such challenges.

Open Access in Geochemistry from Preprints to Data Sharing: Past, Present, and Future

In this short communication, we discuss the latest advances regarding Open Access in the earth sciences and geochemistry community from preprints to findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data following the 14f session held at Goldschmidt conference (4–9 July 2021) dedicated to “Open Access in Earth Sciences”.

Scientific and technical information's restoration in the open access environment through smart search engines

Open access is one of the topics that attracted the researchers interest as it is a turning point for the recovery of technical and scientific information’s recovery which requires a set of tools and technical skills. This study aims to discover the main problems of information’s recovery within open access in addition to the inventory of the most important smart search engines and to know the strategies of information’s recovery. The study adopted the descriptive analytical approach, and came out with a number of important conclusions, the most important are : Searching for scientific and technical information in the open access environment has become a very difficult and the researcher does not know which of them is more useful. Relying on the common ranking of sites, smart search engines in its work, depends on semantic web applications, most notably XML, RDF and ontology, users can quickly find specific search results through smart search engines without having to become experts in search engines or have a well-defined strategies for searching within the open access environment. The study also showed that the semantic scholar search engine deals with open sources more efficiently than traditional search engines through its ability to discover these sources and display them to the beneficiary in a distinctive way.

The association of pre-existing comorbid conditions with COVID-19 severity and post-COVID complications; insights from South Asia

doi: https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.38.3.5719 How to cite this:Saeed S, Rajani R. The association of pre-existing comorbid conditions with COVID-19 severity and post-COVID complications; insights from South Asia. Pak J Med Sci. 2022;38(3):439-441. doi: https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.38.3.5719 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.