Jul 10 2015
Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, and the US National Cancer Institute (NCI), a world-leading institute for cancer research, today announced that they have implemented two-way linking between research articles on ScienceDirect and datasets stored in NCI's cancer Nanotechnology Laboratory (caNanoLab) data portal. The NCI is part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).
caNanoLab provides facilities for the submission and retrieval of information on well-characterized nanomaterials, including composition, physico-chemical and in vitro/in vivo characterizations, and protocols. This resource, developed by NCI, is designed to support information sharing across the international biomedical nanotechnology research community to expedite and validate the use of nanotechnology in biomedicine. As such, caNanoLab provides publically accessible cancer nanotechnology data and enables the sharing of non-public data between established collaboration groups.
Reciprocal linking between data portals and scientific literature ensures that the core research output - research data - is easy to find and can be reused by other researchers who want to build upon previous work. Scientific and biomedical research datasets stored in the caNanoLab data portal are currently accessible through research articles from ten Elsevier journals available on ScienceDirect and vice versa - the research articles can also be accessed from the datasets in caNanoLab.
Dr. Stephanie Morris, Program Director in NCI's Office of Cancer Nanotechnology Research, said, "As part of our mission, NCI supports efforts to make research data more accessible to scientists everywhere. Direct linking between research articles and the underlying nanomaterial characterization data is an opportunity to increase communication between scientists. Every time we make it easier and faster to obtain high-quality and complete datasets for experimental reuse and reproduction, it is a win-win for the entire research community."
Dr. Kinam Park, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Controlled Release (JCR), said, "The number of publications made in the cancer nanotechnology area is so large that information sharing has become difficult, even with the help of search engines. caNanoLab is an exciting first step in achieving a free flow of information on all nanoparticles used in cancer research. The authors of JCR will participate to add data from their publications to caNanoLab during the publication process for speedy dissemination of the nanomaterial data. This initiative will greatly enhance information exchange in the entire cancer nanotechnology community, accelerating further advances."
Reciprocal linking between articles and data is one of Elsevier's initiatives for sharing research data. Elsevier collaborates with more than forty data repositories, and is continually looking to collaborate with other relevant organizations.