Other Resources in Development

UPDATE 2/23/14.

Major areas under development right now

• Wikipedia Editathon
• Full text analysis of the MBE literature
• Creation of a protocol sharing system
• Development of teaching materials for MBE field
• Networking tools to connect together researchers interested in collaborating
• Network analysis of the MBE field

 

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We are in the process of developing a diversity of other resources for microBEnet. We welcome suggestions for what would be useful to people. Among the items we are currently looking to develop:

Open Science topics

1. Reproducibility.  We would like to have the students add a reproducibility component to their project and I think we should write about this issue.
2. Peer review.  Not sure what to say about this but it is a good topic to discuss and maybe compare and contrast between micro and building sciences.
3. Open access publishing
4. Social media and science.  Many possible topics here.
5. Socially aware science tools like Mendeley.
6. Alt metrics.
7. Protocols – online, up-to-date documentation about common and standard approaches in both fields (from sampling to bioinformatic workflows). This would also include tutorials, powerpoints, how-to lectures, etc.
8. Data deposition – related to reproducibility, but with more practical considerations. How to make your data most useful to other users (metadata, publishing raw/processed data). Discussion of different repositories, their pros/cons, and how repositories differ across fields (and create challenges for interdisciplinary research).

More about the Sloan IE Program

• Different projects
• Scope and goals
• History

Additional general resources

• Funding opportunities (US and International)
• Lists of journals of interest
• Culture collections
• More information about researchers and institutes working on related topics

Expanding current topics/resources

• Reference collections
  • Latest from reference collections
  • Paper of the day
  • Most read/cited
  • Keyword tags
• Expanded calendar

Blog topics

• News roundup
• Meeting reports
• Story behind the story of new Sloan Funded publications
• Journal club with discussion of new papers
• Blogs of interest

Teaching resources

• Slides
• Exercises and activities
• Open access materials and papers that can be used freely

Guides and tutorials on:

• Methods used in molecular studies of microbial diversity
• How to use microBEnet resources
• How to more broadly share ones own resources (e.g., data, papers, slides, recording talks, etc)
• Bioinformatics for microbial diversity
• Why study microbiology of the built environment
• Twitter
• Giant flow chart of sampling methods and methodological approaches depending on your question
• Bioaerosol sampling
• Surface sampling (including vacuuming)
• Material sampling (e.g. from contaminated particle board)
• Microbial diversity assays

Other ideas

• Better linking with Wikipedia (and maybe more curation there)
• Open textbook development
• Citizen science efforts
• Open wet ware site
• Amazon store
• Talks of interest (for Calendar)
• Social media sites/pages for people working on microbiology of the built environment
• Open science resources
• Connection between built environment and health: hospitals, buildings, biodefense
• Office hours?
• Story behind papers
• BE data – making things usable by non micro people
• Online journal club
• Export Mendeley collection to single static page for easy browsing
• Slides
• Resources for reporters
  • What counts of microbes mean and don’t mean
  • Many microbes not pathogens
  • Just b/c rRNA says a microbe is there does not mean we know what it does
• Samples from famous buildings
• Profiles of microBE scientists
• Field guide to microbes of the BE
• Service providers

• microbiology blogs
• keywords on Twitter
• create more hashtags
• microbeworld
• videos from Youtube, Ted, etc

Scientific literature

Paper of the day from Mendeley

Papers citing Mendeley collection