Harvard Medical School's Countway Library of Medicine and the new frontiers in biomedical computing
2014-01-24
Battle of the beauty contests
So how best to have a public debate about how we allocate the public monies for biomedical research?
.
Hat tip: David Osterbur.
2014-01-23
Welcome news from the Wellcome Collection
Many of us have had the following experience. We find an interesting illustration and use it for a scholarly presentation or for a class. Then a well meaning compliance officer will notify us that if we are going to put the presentation on the web, we will have to secure the rights to the illustration for that purpose. Often the expedient response is to delete the illustration or withdraw the entire presentation from the public domain.
In this context this British invasion is a hopeful glimpse of the future. One hundred thousand pictures were just made freely available (so long as you correctly attribute their provenance). So, if you want to illustrate Harvey’s anatomical exercises of the heart and circulation, or contrast modern medical advertising to that of a well regarded phrenologist, the materials are there for you (see below), for free and without any administrative overhead. The other flank of the British open access image invasion is led by the British Library from which the charming picture below of the anatomy of the leech was taken.