Global Plants (plants.jstor.org) holds more than 1.8 million plant type specimens—the authoritative records for plant species that are catalogued in herbaria around the world—along with their scientific names and classifications. It also includes complementary material such as paintings, photographs and the correspondence of explorers who originally discovered and collected various species.

The effort to bring these materials online originated with a small group of herbaria, then called the African Plants Initiative (API). The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided funding to API to digitize African flora, specifically plant type specimens. The project grew to incorporate herbaria and plants from Latin America and, ultimately, became global in scale.

Today, GPI partner organizations from Argentina to Zimbabwe capture data and use digital technologies to create high resolution images of type specimens from their collections, as well as other types of content that are contributed to the database. JSTOR acts as their virtual hub, providing the production systems, support for digitizing the types and a platform for the discovery and use of the content by the partners’ own researchers as well as others at institutions throughout the world.

“GPI has galvanized the bioinformatics community, establishing an important precedent for global collaboration on a scale rarely seen in any academic discipline,” said Lauren Raz, Instituto de Ciencias Naturales, Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

With this large and growing virtual herbaria in place, scientists and students can explore plant life from local and global vantage points, often discovering plants or colleagues they would not have located previously.

“[Because of Global Plants], we have received many inquiries from scientists all over the world making our herbarium more visible to the botanical community and significantly increasing its value,” commented Laura Iharlegui of Curadora del Herbario (LP), Museo de La Plata in Argentina.

And then there are the possibilities of new discoveries. By building Global Plants together, scientists hope to identify new species, catalogue the destruction of species and better understand changes in ecosystems over time.

“Global Plants is a perfect example of the way in which previously collected information presented in a new format is stimulating research that might otherwise never be undertaken,” said Ken Cameron, a professor in the Department of Botany at University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Global Plants has been in development for many years, tripling in size, and is now transitioning from a grant-funded project to one that the GPI partners and JSTOR hope will be sustained by a growing network of institutions. The GPI partners will contribute financial support; JSTOR will provide infrastructure and other services; and educational, cultural and other not-for-profit research institutions will contribute annual fees for access to some parts of the database.

“Our partners have a vested interest in ensuring the GPI collaboration and database continue to thrive and grow,” stated Barbara M. Thiers, director, William and Lynda Steere Herbarium at the New York Botanical Garden. “It is a landmark project for science, and a great example of how the academic community can take advantage of technology to advance research.”

For more information on Global Plants: http://about.jstor.org/global-plants
For the complete press release: http://about.jstor.org/news/global-plants-initiative-and-jstor-release-online-database-study-plants

Patent abstract: The present invention provides methods and apparatus for the preparation of nitrogen fertilizers including ammonium nitrate, urea, urea-ammonium nitrate, and/or ammonia, at low temperature and pressure utilizing a source of carbon, a source of nitrogen, and/or a source of hydrogen or hydrogen equivalent. Implementing electrolyte serving as ionic charge carrier, (1) ammonium nitrate is produced via reduction of nitrogen source at the cathode and oxidation of nitrogen source at the anode; (2) urea or its isomers are produced via simultaneous cathodic reduction of carbon source and nitrogen source; (3) ammonia is produced via reduction of nitrogen source at the cathode and oxidation of hydrogen source or a hydrogen equivalent such as carbon monoxide or a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen at the anode; and (4) urea-ammonium nitrate is produced via simultaneous cathodic reduction of carbon source and nitrogen source, and anodic oxidation of nitrogen source.

The Illinois Natural History Survey is one of the data providers for the project.

This program is designed to facilitate conducting sliding-block analysis (also called permanent-deformation analysis) of slopes in order to estimate slope behavior during earthquakes. The program allows selection from among more than 2,100 strong-motion records from 28 earthquakes and allows users to add their own records to the collection. Any number of earthquake records can be selected using a search interface that selects records based on desired properties. Sliding-block analyses, using any combination of rigid-block (Newmark), decoupled, and fully coupled methods, are then conducted on the selected group of records, and results are compiled in both graphical and tabular form. Simplified methods for conducting each type of analysis are also included.

Visualization is easy, right? After all, it’s just some colorful shapes and a few text labels. But things are more complex than they seem, largely due to the the ways we see and digest charts, graphs, and other data-driven images. While scientifically-backed studies do exist, there are actually many things we don’t know about how and why visualization works. To help you make better decisions when visualizing your data, here’s a brief tour of the research.

The full text of all papers lives on the original hosting site, usually the repository of the university that granted the degree. OATD indexes about the first 30 pages of some theses in order to show search hits, but in no case does OATD index or store the full text of the paper.

The list of participating institutions is available at http://oatd.org/oatd-publishers.html and includes the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A parallel world of pseudo-academia, with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that will print seemingly anything for a fee, has the scientific community alarmed.

See also Nature’s special report on the future of publishing, which includes an article about predatory scholarly open access publishers. Particularly useful is the article’s checklist to help researchers identify reputable publishers.

Another good resource is Jeffrey Beall’s Scholarly Open Access blog and its associated list of probable predatory open-access journals.