Monday 15 Oct

The rapid increase in the use of smartphones and tablets means that chemical information providers are faced with a new set of challenges: how to effectively and efficiently provide chemical content to a mobile user. This is not simply a question of making websites run on iPhone! but rather a task to understand the needs and requirements of a mobile chemistry user.
We will outline some examples of mobile application design and implementation, highlighting the key factors encountered in idea generation, product design, and implementation. We will discuss the needs and requirements of different market groups including undergraduate / PhD students, academic and corporate researchers. We will also discuss some of the challenges involved in the sales and marketing of these applications. 
 

Scientific publishing has been going through a period of rapid change in terms of business model, delivery mechanisms, the growth of meta-data and the calls for raw research data.

This presentation takes a whistle stop tour of how the publishing industry, from the Nature Publishing Group point of view, has been reacting to these changes and, ultimately, what will the article of the future be?

Content is omnipresent. The growth of internet, and availability of multiple devices like PC, smartphone and tablet with rich multimedia capability has enabled publishers to deliver content in multiple ways to users anywhere, anytime. Native mobile apps and HTML5 based apps have allowed users to experience the same content in diverse ways. Web APIs are being mashed up to package existing content and deliver new knowledge to consumers. Digital content is being overlaid onto the physical world using augmented reality to bring content to life. Bundling publisher content with user generated content is emerging as a new trend. Users are being given the controls to customize presentation of content. Content filters such as location, demographics, usage logs and social media usage patterns are being used to deliver more personalized content experience. The growth of open access literature has opened up opportunities to design newer ways to serve content to researchers.

Growing heterogeneity in the publishing environment has led to the availability of content in multiple contexts. Smarter content delivery helps in retaining the meaning of content in diverse contexts and is capable of evolving as per researcher’s topics of interest and personality. Choosing the right content delivery approach to respond to a dynamic content landscape is a major challenge.

This presentation discusses some of the innovative approaches, and technological advances that publishers can leverage for smarter delivery of chemistry content.
 

Asia is the world’s largest and most populous continent with 60% of its population, but provides only 40% of invention patent application in the world. Asia as a region has the second largest nominal GDP after Europe, but most Asian countries are still at developing stage. China and many other Asian countries have made significant progress in developing IP during recent years and have been keeping momentum for further development. The future trends of the patent landscape in China and Asia are further improving patent prosecution and enforcement including working out with IP big 5 an improved and unified patent classification; Developing contemporary, more efficient and accurate searching system with semantic search capacity; Promoting human aided machine translation for countries such as China, Korea and Japan whos languages are difficult to understand by western people; streamlining and harmonizing patent procedure; promoting PPH pilot program to avoid repeating search and examination works; harmonizing patent laws worldwide is also put back on our agenda again.

 

In 2011, China reached the long anticipated status of the number one publisher of invention patent applications in the world. Last year also saw the implementation of the 12th National Five-Year Plan on Science & Technology Development which lays out a number of ambitious goals for the further development of China as a technologically advanced nation:

•     increase in R&D expenditure as a proportion of GDP from 1.75% in 2010 to 2.2% in 2015;
•     improvement in ranking of citations in international science papers from 8th to 5th;
•     increase in invention patent ownership per 10,000 head of population from 1.7 to 3.3

This presents an increasing challenge in sourcing, understanding and analyzing information to help interpret the trends and plan for the impacts of this dramatic change in China’s place in the world. 

In this presentation, you will learn about some available sources of patent, business and STM information from China together with some analytical tools and techniques to help address these challenges for the future.
 

In May 2007, the Five IP Offices (IP5), group formed by the five biggest patent offices in the world, initiated the IP5 programme. Since October 2008, the IP5 have been engaged in ten collaborative projects known as the Foundation Projects. These projects were devised to harmonise the search and examination environment of each office and to standardise the information-sharing process. The projects are expected to facilitate the work-sharing initiative by enhancing the quality of patent searches and examinations and by building mutual trust in each other's work.
This presentation aims at giving an overview of the recent activities within this framework and of what can be expected in the near future.

Most  users of patent information fight constantly against an overflow of information and a fast growing number of hits, they get as an answer to a search questions. Although  improved tools like full text searching, improvement in databases, more powerful machines or text mining programs  help to live with this situation, it looks like that information grows more rapidly than our capability to handle it.

To overcome this situation it is proposed to raise the bar of formal requirements for patent applications. This can only be done by the patent offices, but obviously, these would in fact profit most from such an initiative. Patent information professionals with their professional knowledge could take the leed for such a development.

Novartis is a multinational, global pharmaceutical company which is separated into a number of distinct divisions (e.g. NIBR, Pharma, Sandoz, Vaccines and Diagnostics, Alcon, Animal Health, Consumer Health). Each division has its own intellectual property function and corresponding patent information group. With the primary focus of each patent information group being towards their respective division, until recently there was little communication or collaboration between the different groups. In 2010, the Patent and Technical Information Practice Team (PTIPT) was formed with representatives from each division and with the aim of developing and implementing best practice for all aspects of searching and analyzing patent-related information within Novartis. This presentation will focus on the achievements of the PTIPT:

• Quality
  • Establishing “Best Practice” documents to ensure consistency and quality

• Maximizing efficiency
  • Minimizing outsourcing
    • Maximizing use of internal resources
  • In-sourcing of patent watches
  • Establishing a preferred list of external search agencies
• Knowledge sharing
  • Development of a web based forum for all patent analysts
  • Face-to-face and virtual meetings
• Training of patent analysts and the wider legal community

The result has been a move to a more integrated, efficient and collaborative patent information community within Novartis.
 

During the last year and a half Novo Nordisk Library has been heavily engaged in an innovation project. The purpose of the project is to develop the library's future services and the users’ access to these services in broad terms. An important part of this is the creative process on defining the future interface, what services to offer, what vocabulary to use, and how the physical library should be. Both the final concepts, and the rather alternative working methods we have been put through by our innovation consultants could be of interest to all the information departments that are facing the future, but don't know how to get started on it.

The increase in drug research output from patents, journal articles and public data collections has made it essential for pharmaceutical companies to integrate the extracted ‘SAR estate’. To handle the massive information explosion in the field of drug discovery several basic integration tasks have to be dealt with such as organizing company’s own data, organizing the access to external data and optimizing the mining and exploitation strategies across both. To meet these challenges, AstraZeneca developed Chemistry Connect, a cheminformatics platform providing access to over 55 million unique chemical structures extracted from 20 internal and external data sources. Of these, 5 million are linked to 10,000 protein identifiers and 12 million structure-activity relationship (SAR) data points and/or other types of bioannotation (e.g. pharmacological activity).
In this presentation we will describe challenges and business benefits of large scale integration of structure and bioactivity data.

 

We have abstracted from selected primary literature structure-activity relationship (SAR) data, and integrated this with other publicly accessible resources such as the PubChem bioactivity data. This provides a valuable resource for several aspects of drug discovery - we have developed ourselves applications for screening library design and selection, selectivity and affinity analysis, target selection and drug reuse activities. A core part of the work of the group is in the curation and error checking of the raw data. We will outline our production pipeline, and discuss areas of interest for data integration and data mining activities.