“Research Councils UK (RCUK) has published the latest version of its guidance for its revised Policy on Open Access, which comes in to effect on 1 April 2013.”

“This latest version draws the policy and the guidance together into one document and aims to give researchers, research organisations as well as publishers further clarity on the implementation of the policy.”

“RCUK is keen to continue to engage with its stakeholders on the development of the guidance, so is inviting organisations to provide further input to this version where aspects may still not be clear. RCUK will then revise the guidance further to take into account these clarifications.”

The deadline for further input is Wednesday 20 March 2013. Input should be sent directly to Alexandra Saxon by email to Alexandra.Saxon@rcuk.ac.uk.

The RCUK Policy and Guidance on Open access is available at: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/documents/RCUKOpenAccessPolicyandRevisedguidance.pdf 

[Source RCUK News: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/media/news/2013news/Pages/130305.aspx ]

“Research funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) has shown that an old, inexpensive anti-gout drug has benefits for heart disease sufferers and has the potential to one day help prevent heart disease, sudden deaths and strokes.”

“University of Dundee researchers, led by Allan Struthers, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine, have shown that allopurinol, a drug that has been used to prevent gout for more than 40 years, reduces thickening of the heart muscle wall, known as left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH).  Such thickening is known to be a modifiable risk factor for future cardiovascular events, and the researchers think allopurinol may be able to prevent adverse outcomes in patients with heart disease.”

“Previous studies by Professor Struthers and his team have shown that angina sufferers who were given allopurinol were able to exercise longer and harder before they experienced the chest pain that occurs when the heart runs short of oxygen. This means the drug reduces symptoms and has the potential to reduce the need for angioplasty, surgery and hospital admissions.”

“According to Professor Struthers this latest research… represents another “piece of the jigsaw” in establishing the benefits that allopurinol can bring in terms of cardiac health.”

The paper, ‘High-Dose Allopurinol Reduces Left Ventricular Mass in Patients With Ischemic Heart Disease’, by Rekhraj et al, is published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jacc.2012.09.066.

[Source MRC News: http://www.mrc.ac.uk/Newspublications/News/MRC009038 ]

“Manuscripts Online, funded by Jisc, brings to life early printed primary sources of medieval Britain, giving online access to written materials from 1000 to 1500. Manuscripts Online is also a crowd sourcing tool, encouraging users to attach comments about the manuscripts they view to an online map.”

“This freely available literary resource is the first of this kind. Michael Pidd, project lead and digital manager at the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield says: “The crowd sourcing aspect of Manuscripts Online gives people an opportunity to share their understanding of the manuscripts so that they can learn from one another. It allows collaboration in a way that hasn’t been possible in the past and we hope it will build up a central geographical view of people’s interpretation of the information which can be used by others in the future.””

“Users will be able to search the resources by keyword, but also by specific keyword types, such as person and place name, date and language. For example, if you search the word York, and include all possible variation in its spelling, it will bring up around 4,000 results and tell you how this word is spelled and used in medieval records.”

Go to the Manuscripts Online website to find out more: http://www.manuscriptsonline.org/

[Source JISC News:  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2013/02/manuscripts-online.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ac%2FuabG+%28JISC+News+Web+Feed%29&utm_content=Google+Reader and with thanks to my colleague Rachel Fell for alerting me to this.]

“Research Councils UK (RCUK) has… published its latest policy and guidelines to help researchers and research organisations achieve the highest standards possible when carrying out research. The policy and guidelines have been updated to reflect growing national and international experience in identifying and promoting good research conduct, and in addressing unsatisfactory conduct.”

“The RCUK Policy and Guidelines on Governance of Good Research Conduct :

•sets standards of good research practice, with associated guidelines

•specifies and describes unacceptable research conduct

•provides guidelines for reporting and investigating allegations of research misconduct

•clarifies the respective responsibilities of the Research Councils and Research Organisations in fostering and safeguarding the highest possible standards of research conduct.”

To read a copy of the guidelines go to:

http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/Publications/researchers/Pages/grc.aspx

[Source RCUK News: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/media/news/2013news/Pages/130226.aspx ]

“People who are at greater genetic risk of schizophrenia are more likely to see a fall in IQ as they age, even if they do not develop the condition.”

“Scientists at the University of Edinburgh say the findings could lead to new research into how different genes for schizophrenia affect brain function over time. They also show that genes associated with schizophrenia influence people in other important ways besides causing the illness itself.”

“The researchers used the latest genetic analysis techniques to reach their conclusion on how thinking skills change with age.”

“They compared the IQ scores of more than 1,000 people from Edinburgh who were tested for general cognitive functions in 1947, when the subjects were aged 11, and again when they were around 70 years old.”

“The researchers were able to examine people’s genes and calculate each subject’s genetic likelihood of developing schizophrenia, even though none of the group had ever developed the illness.”

The research has been reported in an article in Biological Psychiatry which can be found at:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2013.01.011 MMU Library has a subscription to this journal.

[Source BBSRC News:  http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/news/health/2013/130221-pr-schizophrenia-genes-iq-loss.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bbsrc+%28BBSRC+-+News+stories+and+features%29&utm_content=Google+Reader ]

Jane in her blog on the Archives Hub says:

“This post picks out some highlights from a report from Ithaka S+R, ‘Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians’ by Roger C Schonfeld and Jennifer Rutner (December 2012). It concentrates on findings that are of particular relevance for archivists and for discovery. The report is recommended reading. It is a US study, but clearly there are strong similarities with other countries.”

“The report finds that underlying research methods are still broadly as they were but practices have changed considerably: “Based on interviews with dozens of historians, librarians, archivists, and other support services providers, this project has found that the underlying research methods of many historians remain fairly recognizable even with the introduction of new tools and technologies, but the day to day research practices of all historians have changed fundamentally.””

“It goes on to summarise the improvements that archives might make to meet changing needs, none of which are unexpected: “For archives, we recommend ongoing improvements to access through improved finding aids, digitization, and discovery tool integration, as well as expanded opportunities for archivists to help historians interpret collections, to build connections among users, and to instruct PhD students in the use of archives.””

To read the rest of the blog go to: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/blog/2013/02/supporting-historians-responding-to-changing-research-practices/

To read a copy of the report go to:  http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/supporting-changing-research-practices-historians

[Source Archives Hub blog as above]

“A collection of The National Archives’ historical criminal records from England and Wales is now available online as part of a licensing partnership with family history website, findmypast.co.uk.”

“The first set of documents, comprising 518,000 records from 1817-1931, [have just gone online] and the remaining records will be published on findmypast.co.uk in the coming months.  Once complete, more than 2.5 million records spanning over 150 years from 1770 to 1934 will be searchable online, providing family and social historians with an invaluable new resource.”

“The records range from petitions for clemency to entry books, judges’ reports, prison registers, transfer papers and gaolers’ reports and chronicle the fate of criminals such as fraudsters, counterfeiters, thieves and murderers as well as their victims.” 

Records which have just gone online are:

• Admiralty registers of convicts in prison hulks between 1818-1831 (ADM 6)

• After trial calendars of prisoners from the Central criminal court between 1855-1931 (CRIM 9)

• Calendar of Prisoners in Home Office records 1868-1929 (HO 140)

• Criminal petitions 1817-1858 (HO 17)

• Metropolitan Police records of habitual drunkards for the period 1903-1914 (MEPO 6)

• Prison Commission records for 1880-1885 (PCOM 2)

“All the records will be free to search and can be downloaded free of charge in [the] reading rooms at Kew or at home for a small fee.”

[Source National Archives news:  http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/news/814.htm?news=rss ]

“Scientists at the University of York have developed a new medical tool which could help surgeons carrying out complex procedures in the operating theatre.  Researchers have developed a dye [the ‘Mallard’ of the title] which provides a quick and accurate method of checking heparin levels in the blood.”

“Heparin is an important anti-coagulant which has a significant role in major surgery. The scientists in the Department of Chemistry at York have used inspiration from biological systems to allow the dye to bind heparin even in highly competitive human serum.”

“In the laboratory, they have modified existing dyes which previously could not bind with heparin successfully under these challenging conditions. The modified dye, which has excellent sensing capacity for heparin pinpoints the anti-coagulant’s level in human serum and has the potential to work more quickly than existing clinical methods for doing this.”

“The research, which was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.”  (DOI: 10.1021/ja311734d).  MMU Library has an online subscription to this journal.

[Source BBSRC News:  http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/news/health/2013/130214-n-mallard-dye-speed-in-surgery.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bbsrc+%28BBSRC+-+News+stories+and+features%29&utm_content=Google+Reader ]

“Research led by Queen Mary, University of London, has shown that recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is possible for some patients, and has identified two treatments most likely to lead to recovery.”

“The latest results from the PACE trial show that cognitive behaviour therapy and graded exercise therapy, as supplements to specialist medical care, increase the likelihood of recovery from CFS three-fold compared to other treatments studied. The trial [was] carried out in collaboration with researchers from King’s College London, the University of Oxford and the Medical Research Council.”

The research paper is available to read free of charge in the journal Psychological Medicine:

http://journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/White_PSM_Paper_Jan13.pdf

[Source Medical Research Council News: http://www.mrc.ac.uk/Newspublications/News/MRC008984 ]

“60 years after Watson and Crick’s ground breaking paper described the double helix structure of DNA, researchers at the University of Cambridge have observed four-stranded DNA structures within human cells. The discovery could open the door to novel cancer therapies and a new era for personalised medicine.”

“The findings mark the culmination of a 10 year investigation, part-funded by Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), into the role of G-quadruplexes within the human genome. Working at the interface of chemistry and biology, from the hypothetical, through computational modelling to synthetic lab experiments, Professor Shankar Balasubramanian and Professor Steve Jackson’s research groups have shown that G-quaruplexes, so-called because they form in guanine-rich DNA sequences, are not just a structural curiosity – they form at sites across the genome in living cells.”

Two research papers reporting their findings are:

Small-molecule-induced DNA damage identifies alternative DNA structures in human genes published in Nature Chemical Biology, 05 February 2012. DOI:10.1038/nchembio.780 http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/v8/n3/full/nchembio.780.html (subscription required – MMU Library does not have a subscription to this journal)

Quantitative visualization of DNA G-quadruplex structures in human cells published in Nature Chemistry, 20 January 2013. DOI:10.1038/nchem.1548

http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchem.1548.html (free access)

[Source BBSRC News:  http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/news/health/2013/130125-n-quadruplex-dna.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bbsrc+%28BBSRC+-+News+stories+and+features%29&utm_content=Google+Reader ]