TDI/TSL's paper entitled "A kernel for the Tropical Disease Initiative" is published today in Nature Biotech. We're very pleased an open source project has been published in such a high-ranking journal, and we hope this stimulates the interest of the scientific community in what's possible. Naturally, we want people to contribute to the science!
This paper will shortly be followed by a full article in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Following on from last week's news from GSK comes a potentially very important announcement from Merck about Sage, a large deposition of biological data and software to the commons. Links and discussion here.

The Scott and O'Donnell labs at IUPUI have published an interesting set of articles in the latest issue (vol 11, issue 1) of the Journal of Combinatorial Chemistry on Distributed Drug Discovery. They're open access articles. The idea is to show that chemical synthesis can be done by multiple labs for the creation of drug-like compounds, and that there is reproducibility between the different sites (from the US to Poland). This is obviously an important requirement for any distributed research effort.

A quick status update. While we were successful in getting our grant with the Australian Research Council and the World Health Organisation, we have so far been unable to formulate a contract that is mutually acceptable to all parties. Negotiations are continuing, but this explains the lack of recent activity coming from our lab on the schisto projects - we don't have the money yet! Fingers crossed this situation will resolve itself positively in the near future.

The Guardian Weekly's a lovely thing (particularly if you don't live in the UK). Two articles in yesterday's edition caught my eye.

We've been successful in securing a large government grant with an open source component. The 3-year project concerns the enantioselective synthesis of PZQ for a low price, with the World Health Organisation as partner. (PDF of the Uni Sydney outcomes is here). The funding comes from the Australian Research Council (the main government funding agency in Australia). We wrote the proposal emphasising the possibilities inherent in the open source approach to doing science, and we're very pleased that this was seen as positive by an official grant-funding agency. The funding will allow us to increase our efforts on using TSL to drive our project forward much faster.

Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE)

JoVE is an excellent peer reviewed video based open access Journal that is truly open source.

See this blog entry which includes a short trailer and various JoVE related links.