Recently, Luis (General Manager of Bioalma) sent me the TV ad for the new search engine Searchme.com. For those who don’t know it yet, Searchme is a visual search engine that allows you to see the website that you are about to visit. Obviously, the ad is the perfect illustration of what Searchme is able to do for you and what changes it represents. I think it is really interesting and it brings up an exciting discussion. How difficult is it to change our processes? And how often do we change the way we do things?.

Changing is difficult. Just think of the last time you changed your favorite coffee brand you have every morning. When was that? Or the tools and programs you’re used to use on your computer. When was it? And what about your search engine. When was it? No need to give an answer now, but I guess it was a long time ago. And I can’t blame you for that, people tend to stick to what they are used to because:

• they are familiar with it
• they have it under control
• they have spent a great deal of time learning to use it at its best
• they were told to use it when they didn’t know much about them
• …

Even if we know that there are better solutions for a certain task we -you, I, everyone- don’t change that easily. The feeling of not having under control what we are doing is something not many people look forward to. Let me put it another way: change in habits is something that take time and can’t be afforded by all of us. How frustrating is it to notice that once you’re used to something, the trend’s already changed? Will you be one of the people who enjoy what they know or one of the people who enjoy what’s to be discovered?

Well, it is a tough question. For instance, how many times, when you are away from home and see an international food chain restaurant, you smile and think, finally somewhere where I know what I’m going to get?

Those are questions that have been studied and discussed more than once. Christensen CM and Raynor ME, in their book The Innovator’s Solution: creating and sustaining successful growth talk about how difficult it is for products to be successful if they request from the user to change processes. Seth Godin, in his book Purple Cow, puts emphasis on the early adopters and show how they can help one firm, one product, one idea or service spread on the market or not.

Searchme.com is a new visual search engine for the web. Unlike others, the results consist of a web site’s screenshot presented in the coverflow manner. This is a great innovation in visualization as the screenshot loads fast and allows you to skip from one to another in no time.

Antonio Ortiz, a Spanish technology blogger sustains that one of the ways of competing in the search engine landscape is by differentiation in visualization. However is not the only one.

Like Searchme there are many others search engine competing offering new visualization results. (For more information, you can read this comprehensive article on Visual Search Engines)

In the biomedical sector there are several  alternative search engine out there too. Few are based on technology to compete others in visualization and some they embraced semantic technologies to find more relevant results and make the search research process faster and less painful.

Since changing is difficult, do you think that people would change their favorite biomedical search engine for another? To what extent? And you, what would you do?

Old book

Good news!!! Today I have seen that the NIH initiative of public access policy will be made permanent. This is quite some time in a so competitive area as Science. Since the policy was implemented the percentage of manuscript sent to PMC has increase over 3,000 new articles each month.

If the information was overwhelming enough with 2,000 new articles per day -more than 18M scientific articles all together- the free access to full articles will increase the amount of data relevant to biomedicine. This increase is not only on the side of number of articles available but also on the total amount of information since the whole text of the article is going to be accessible. This brings new interesting challenges.

The question now is, how do we get through all the new information fast and efficiently? System that helps get relevant scientific information such as novoseek are more needed than ever.

However, is it really useful for scientists to have the results freely available 1 year behind? Obviously it is not the best possible scenario but the analysis of literature and Grant information could give us an insight on what would be new potential upcoming articles.

We saw some very timely news this week related to scientific research and funding with President Barack Obama’s decision to end embryonic stem cell research bans in the US. This decision has brought both rejoice from the science community and controversy from those that do not stand behind stem cell research. 

We analyze the issue from three different perspectives:

• Economy: Former President George W. Bush didn’t directly prohibit the research on embryonic stem cells but banned the public finance of the research which was enormously inhibiting. Some scientists believed this limitation had a negative impact on competition, since they had to spend more time finding alternative financing and the research therefore suffered, given funding fuels the competence of scientific research overall. The lack of this public funding for embryonic stem cell research has put the US eight years behind. Countries like the UK have taken advantage of this and they have the most relevant experts in the area.
• Scientific: The use of stem cells can become a cure for those diseases in which etiology is cell destruction or malfunction. This is the case of pathologies such as Alzheimer, Parkinson or diabetes, among others. However, why use embryonic stem cells when adult stem cells are able to do the same thing?  Scientists claim that all the research on new treatments with stem cells is based on the comparison of the properties among both types of stem cells.  Adult stem cells also do not maintain all pluri-potential properties attributed to embryonic stem cells which can be restrictive in their use in the cure of some diseases.
• Moral: Stem cell research is a very controversial issue for several different reasons. The main issue has to do with research on embryonic stem cells needing an embryo that will have to be destroyed.  However, this issue can be rectified because there are techniques that can avoid that embryo’s destruction.

Science is meant to discover and develop things that make our life easier and better and sometimes, longer (if we can find cures to diseases such as Parkinson or Alzheimer, for example). The embryo cell technology can lead to the cure of many diseases and help many people. However, medical innovation is not all about federal funding. As Scott Gottlieb, M.D puts it even though the measure has been followed by an increase of the NIH budget by $10,4 billion the process to transform a the basic research into a useful therapy finds new barriers when they have to be approved by the FDA.

It seems that President Barack Obama’s decision is a step forward towards on embryonic stem cell research, however it looks like there are many other battles to fight before we can see therapies available soon, at least in the US.

As you may know we were at the Tri-Conference Molecular Medicine to present novo|seek and we really enjoyed it. Obviously San Francisco is far away from Madrid, I repeat, faaaarr away from Madrid. However, both the show and the city are worth the trip. We arrived in San Francisco a bit late at night and joined the show the day after. Consequently, we had to set everything up in no more than 15 minutes before I gave a talk on novo|seek. Thank you to those who attended it.

That first day was really busy: we had a lot of people coming by -and surprised to face a FREE product- giving us new ideas and sharing thoughts with us on the industry. No need to tell you that it’s been really interesting and fulfilling.
We had the chance to meet Bernadette Torner from GenomeWeb with whom we had a a nice chat and with Yannick Pouliot who works at  Standford School of Medicine at the Lane Medical Library. Interestingly, he instantly understood novoseek and its purpose. He always has interesting new insights and projects going up. Good luck with that!

Apart from work, we had our deal of funny things that really caught our attention. First, the number of Starbucks in San Francisco is amazing. Second, the taxi driver. No matter where your travel to, there are always good stories with taxi drivers. In our case we discussed about the hidden Web and wondered whether to trust someone who has no results in Google or not.

Our trip back was a little annoying. In Philadelphia we remained in the plane for almost 2 hours, the time necessary to take the snow out of it. Although it was really impressive and entertaining, it didn’t contribute to a nice trip. By the way, did I mention that San Francisco is really far from Madrid?

Anyway, thanks to all of you who walked by our stand and didn’t hesitate to give us feedback on novoseek. We are always looking forward to it.
See you at our next show: Bio-IT world.

Dodo bird

The NIH’s recent measure responds to a paradox in the field of scientific publications.  It is the classic “chicken or egg” scenario.

First, much of the content generation is done so at no cost to the “publishing house”.  Researchers, sponsored mainly by public institutions – and driven by their own interests and search for knowledge – create new research.  The new content creation is usually based on “free” generation, collaboration and assessment of content.

Second, the publishing companies then add value by managing, editing and distributing that content. In this process, “end-user” scientists have willingly paid publishers for the ability to access this “approved” content.

So the paradox before us is…if the free content is based upon paid content (made available through publishing houses), should the new content be made available for free or follow the publishing payment model?

In fact, there is no black and white answer – but new technologies are creating an even more heated debate.

New technologies and the Internet have simplified the editing  and distribution processes, opening new possibilities for additional  formats and business models, such as open access publications, in  which access to contents is free and redistribution is at your fingertips.  Will the new technologies be able to handle the role that traditional publishers have successfully handled for nearly 100 years in the areas of managing, editing and distributing that content?

In the new model – what becomes of peer review?  In  the traditional method, public institutions fund the management and the peer-review  editing process, since these publications charge researchers for the  distribution and circulation of their work once it is considered  scientifically relevant.

Through PubMed Central, the NIH has generated a centralized system aimed to distribute scientific works which have already undergone a peer-review process, and have made scientists sponsored by the NIH add a clause regarding the copyright’s release to publishing companies, before the last version of their work can be  placed in this repository 12 months before the publication. Congress’s proposal wishes to avoid this kind of measure.

We must take into account that the research process is strongly supported in the maintained publication of new results, which daily becomes the base for additional discoveries by scientists. Better access to information and the implementation of easier conversations, such as access offered by the Internet would accelerate research, as mentioned  by Mr. Akst in The WSJ: “knowledge dissemination is crucial for the creation of wealth and can’t reproduce in isolation.”

It is true that the management of any peer-review process is necessary if willing to maintain the quality and excellence of scientific works,  but it is in any case a process in which scientists collaborate  voluntarily, a process in which new technologies have enabled a new,  easier distribution. And if there is an entity willing to lead the centralization of contents, is it sensible to approve measures not favoring this access to content?

Unfortunately I don’t have an answer.  To deny access to valuable medical information, just doesn’t seem right.  Neither does denying a commercial business the right to operate when it provides a valuable service.

So – chicken or egg?  All I know is this debate is not likely to go the way of the dodo bird anytime soon.