Michael Weiner, MD, Director of CIND at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, is among a prestigious group of 17 scientists named 2010 Rock Stars of Science by the Geoffrey Beene Foundation. The Rock Stars of Science campaign brings rock stars and “rock star” scientists together to help raise awareness about the important role of scientific research.

Open access to our body of federally funded research, including not only published papers but also any supporting data and code, is imperative, not just for scientific progress but for the integrity of the research itself. We list below nine focus areas and recommendations for action.

Nature News – Moves to make research funded by the US government available to everyone could mark a turning point in a publishing revolution. The push to open up scientific knowledge to all looks set to go into overdrive. Two parallel efforts from the US government could see almost all federally funded research made available in free, publicly accessible repositories. Declan Butler reports.

Special correspondent Dave Iverson reports on a new push to get scientists to work together to find medical cures sooner.
Collaborative efforts could speed medical advances.
Reported by Judy Woodruff on the PBS Newshour.

In 2003, a group of scientists and executives from the NIH, the FDA, the drug and medical-imaging industries, universities and nonprofit groups joined in a project that had no precedent: a collaborative effort to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in the human brain. The collaboration is already serving as a model for similar efforts against Parkinson’s disease.

Organized by Michael Weiner, Center for Imaging of Neurodegenerative Diseases (CIND), UCSF, and Olga Brazhnik, NCRR

Large amounts of data are being generated annually on the connection between the sequence, structure and function of proteins. However, much experimental data are never deposited in databases and is thus ‘lost’ in journal publications or in PhD theses. At the same time theoretical scientists are in need of large amounts of experimental data for benchmarking and calibrating.

Contemporary bioscience sometimes demands vast sample sizes and there is often then no choice but to synthesize data across several studies and to undertake an appropriate pooled analysis. This same need is also faced in health-services and socio-economic research. When a pooled analysis is required, analytic efficiency and flexibility are often best served by combining the individual-level data….