Contents

1. Importance of access to biomedical information for researchers in research groups of molecular medicine Annikki Roos Turid Hedlund Swedish School of Economics and B.A. Helsinki, Finland

2. Contents • Background • Motivation for the choice of MM • Biomedicine – molecular medicine • Information environment • Case study and survey results • Conclusions

3. We asume that • Disciplines have differencies • In research traditions • In research processes • In publishing practices • In information environments • It is profitable to understand the nature of a discipline

4. Molecular medicine (MM) • A sub-discipline of biomedicine • Biomedicine + molecular biology (biochemistry + cell biology + virology + genetics) • Studies biological processes and mechanisms of diseases • Usage of the molecular and genetic techniques

5. Why MM? • Because • The huge amount of information • Variety of information objects and tools • Tehnology driven, expensive • Tradition and need for sharing data and working globally -> Possibilities and challenges for open access -> supports progress in MM

6. Information environment • Data • Metadata • Databases • Documents • Published • Unpublished • Programs and tools

7. Information access • Activities • Seek, Retrieve, Search • Use • Analyze • Combine • Compare • Filter • Interact, share, disseminate • Manage • store

8. Methods used in the case study • Study object: Finnish research unit in MM • Survey sent to about 80 researchers in the unit • Answers recieved from 63 or 75% of the researchers • Questions asked about the information environment, used sources, present research projects and work tasks

9. Juniors PubMed UCSC Genome Browser Google Seniors PubMed Google UCSC Genome Browser Results from the case study : The most useful resource

10. Results regarding the use of information sources • 53 % of researchers use dominantly articles • 23 % do not follow particular titles • 91 % had used research databases during their current project • 43 data resources • 67 tools

11. Results: The most popular databases and tools • The NCBI and Entrez databases • UCSC Genome Browser • In general: proteomics and sequence databases • Primer3 (a PCR primer designer tool)

12. Results: Current work tasks 80 1. working in the laboratory % 2. searching information from literature databases or other sources 60 3. reading literature 4. writing an article or a report 5. searching data from data collections/databases 40 6. scientific computing 7. developing of programs or other tools 20 8. planning (e.g. a new project) 9. research administration 10. other 0 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

13. Publishing strategy of scientific articles for the coming year

14. Top Journals with most suitable scope of publishing

15. Conclusions • Various data resources and tools • Use of these resouses is an integral part of research in MM • Strong reliance on traditional journals

16. Research process in the information environment Medical practise diagnosis treatmen prevention Tools laboratory data samples Data Protein sequences Search Human genes & diseases Research questions Genomes RNA sequences Analysis Work tasks Nucleotide sequence dbs DNA sequences Published results articles reports books Integration

17. Research process in the prevailing information environment Medical practise diagnosis treatmen prevention Tools laboratory data samples Data Protein sequences Search Genomes RNA sequences Analysis Research questions RESEARCH PROCESS Human genes & diseases Nucleotide sequence dbs DNA sequences Published results articles reports books Integration

18. Some future requirements • Homogenization of data • Homogenization of concepts • More integration btw data and other i-objects • Integration between databases • Software integration (tools) • Metainformation about bioinformatics resources • Open information environment

19. …would lead to acceleration of • the research process • new inventions • new knowledge