The Earth Day turns 40 this year. These idea and movement started over a diner, and they have now become a global action day which concern everybody. The Earth Day is a great opportunity to get involved in making the world better. This is as simple as planting a tree, riding a bus instead of your car, taking your kids to Disney’s last movie Oceans, install solar panel on your roof get a convection oven or tracking your energy usage online… I am sure that you will find what to do today on this special day. Beyond one’s involvement for Earth Day, there is all the scientific efforts that are made to improve life on Earth and face the new challenges on Earth. We thought it would be a good idea to share with you 10 Open Access (Free Full Text) articles interesting to read on the Earth Day 2010.

1. Air Pollution: Salt Mist Is the Right Seasoning for Ozone. by Portera Carol in Environmental Health Perspectives
   PMCID: 2453175
2. Room to Grow: Incentives Boost Energy-Efficient Homebuilding. by Schmidt, Charles W. on Environmental Health Perspectives
   PMCID: 2199292
3. Terra Cognita: Using Earth Observing Systems to Understand Our World. by Schmidt, Charles W. on Environmental Health Perspectives
   PMCID: 1277880
4. Cars, corporations, and commodities: Consequences for the social determinants of health by Woodcock, James and Alfred, Rachel in Emerging Themes in Epidemiology
   PMCID: 2289830, DOI: 10.1186/1742-7622-5-4
5. Perchlorate: Health Effects and Technologies for Its Removal from Water Resources. by Srinivasan, Asha and Viraraghavan, Thiruvenkatachari in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
   PMCID: 2681191, DOI:10.3390/ijerph6041418
6. Indirect Potable Reuse: A Sustainable Water Supply Alternative. by Rodriguez, Clemencia; Van Buynder, Paul; Lugg, Richard; Blair, Palenque; Devine, Brian; Cook, Angus, and Weinstein, Philip; in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
   PMCID: 2672392, DOI: 10.3390/ijerph6031174
7. Population policies, programmes and the environment. by Speidel, J. Joseph; Weiss, Deborah C.; Ethelston, Sally A., and Gilbert, Sarah M. in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
   PMCID: 2781834, DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0162
8. The ecosystem-service chain and the biological spanersity crisis. by Mooney, Harold A. in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
   PMCID: 2842713, DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0223e
9. Environmental Remediation and Conversion of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) into Useful Green Products by Accelerated Carbonation Technology. by Lim, Mihee; Han, Gi-Chun; Ahn, Ji-Whan, and You, Kwang-Suk in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
   PMCID: 2819785, DOI: 10.3390/ijerph7010203
10. Is It Easy to Be Urban? Convergent Success in Urban Habitats among Lineages of a Widespread Native Ant. by Menke, Sean B.; Booth, Warren; Dunn, Robert R.; Schal, Coby; Vargo, Edward L., and Silverman, Jules 1 in PLoS ONE
    PMCID: 2820551, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009194
11. Development of a biomechanical energy harvester. by Li, Qingguo; Naing, Veronica; Donelan, J Maxwell; in Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation
    PMCID: 2709631, DOI: 10.1186/1743-0003-6-22

These articles were found features of novoseek such as combinations of keywords, filters or advanced search. I also took good care to tag the articles in a “EarthDay” tag in my my novoseek account so I can retrieve them anytime as it is shown below.

Now tell us: What are your picks for 2010 Earth Day among novoseek’s Free Full Text articles? Share them with us!

We are glad to announce the launch of the biomedical gadgets working thanks to the novoseek’s API. The use of the biomedical gadgets is open to everyone and free. You can get your API Key today and start using the gadgets to extract relevant biomedical information from novoseek and to create biomedical gadgets. In order to create biomedical gadgets, you just have to follow a few steps to publish it on your website or blog.

Gadgets will allow you to publish biomedical information where you want. Gadgets can be published on your blog, website…(where scripts are accepted) and will alllow you to easily extract information from the literature according to your query. With the gadgets you will:

• Enrich your content
• Integrate valuable data
• Display more information
• And no need to know about programming.

There are at this time 2 types of gadgets:

• The Key Concept Gadget allowing you to display the information related to any biomedical concept.
• The Document Gadget allowing you to display the most recent documents related to your search.

Through an intuitive interface, you will create handy gadgets in a few seconds and will be able to publish a gadget where you need it and modifying it as many time as you want. You are also able to create multiple different gadgets.

Let’s have a look at the possibilities brought by the gadgets with a few examples:

• Insert a Document gadget on your Diabetes blog sidebar to keep readers updated on the most recent scientific publications.

Example: 10 latest publications for Diabetes.

• Insert a gadget to show the most relevant disease, pharmacological substances, genes & proteins, chemical substances, organisms, organs & body parts, tissues, biological functions, procedures-techniques, journals, authors -a combination of them or all of them- related to your query.

Example: Tissues, Biological functions and Procedures/techniques related to “chronic granulomatous disease”

• Match the gadget design to your blog’s.

The examples shown previously have a style by default but you can easily change the design colors, width and height during the creation of biomedical gadgets.

Last but not least, we recommend you to watch the tutorial video about the gadgets to see how easy it works.

We’d love to hear from you and know how you are using the gadgets, so feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.

I could have told you about the BioTechnica in Hannover last week in a traditional blogpost (which indeed I did as you can see below), but I prefer to sum it up in 10 words:

1. Huge

The show area is composed of 26 different halls. Hopefully the Biotechnica just occupied 2 of them. You’d better follow the signs in order not to get lost.

2. B32

The exact position of our booth, to be remembered in such a huge complex.

3. Green

The booth color, which actually helped make a difference.

4. Skilled

The people that came visit us, they were either professionals or students who are already used to biomedical online search.

5. Motivating

The feedback we received from them and the ideas they could suggest us.

6. Free

The answer we had to give everytime we were asked “How much does novoseek cost? “.

7. 400

The number of promotionnal items we have been giving away to visitors.

8. 5 hours

The maximum time one can stand without sitting, and it hurts afterward.

9. BioMatters

The name of the company we had next to our booth and we enjoyed speaking with.

10. Seven

The number of beers I managed to drink during those 4 days (“C’mon! I was in Germany“)

If you follow us on twitter or facebook, you may have noticed that we were out at the Biotechnica last week. What’s the Biotechnica? Simply the biggest European show in the field of biotechnologies that takes place yearly in Hannover (Germany).

Obviously, you understand how important it is for us to be there, as we did for major shows in the United States during the year 2009. The importance of the show, the people and companies attending it, its growing influence have made that Bioalma,Spanish -and therefore European- company took the opportunity to go meet professionals, prospects and users from the old continent.

What have we been doing there? Principally meet people and explain them what is novoseek and explain them why it is a great tool. Obviously, some of them would already know novoseek and ask very specific questions.

Nevertheless, one of the main question we were asked, the detail that triggered people’s curiosity is knowing what has to be paid for in novoseek. The answer left them even more surprised as novoseek is a free biomedical search engine. “Free, you have just said? So how do you guys make money?” Well, we make money out of advertisement displayed here and there across the pages on one hand. And thanks to companies announcing via our media platform.

Naturally, we had some time for dinners & bears to follow up with colleagues, users and providers. Its great to be able from time to time to see the faces of people with whom you exchange e-mails, phone calls, twitts…

We have recently added to novoseek new articles from PubMed Central. This new feature provides the ability to access “full text publications” and we have noticed that there is quite some misunderstanding regarding what has actually been indexed. So let us explain it in detail.

Indeed, we have included the Open Access subset of PubMed Central. What is that? Well, Open Access is the free online access to research papers. Obviously, this definition has driven some confusion and misuse of the term “open” access as it is often considered a synonym to “free” access.

The first definition for open access came up at the Budapest Open Access Initiative which was later revised in Bethesda and Berlin. This led to what Peter Suber calls the BBB open access definition for which most of the Open Access Movement agreed on.
The Open Access definition stands around two ideas:

• Free of charge accessibility
• Tears down permission barriers

Consequently, these ideas make distribution, copying and derivative work production possible to anyone.

Interestingly, we’ve observed that most of the time, open access is used as a synonym to free access. This is not quite correct since open access goes beyond just free access to content. For a better understanding of the differences between them, have a look at the graphic below.

PubMed Central is a free peer reviewed digital archive of biomedical and life sciences literature developed and managed by the NIH. It gives free access to articles among which some are open access. As we have discussed in previous posts, the NIH public access policy has ensured the access to published results of NIH funded research. However it does not say whether it has to be through a free access or an open access policy.

In novoseek, we have analyzed with our text mining algorithms the full text of the open access subset and we have made it public. So now you will find full text articles in which you will be able to highlight all the relevant keywords, and enjoy the great features of our technology.

We hope you like this new data set and we will more than welcome your comments and suggestions.