Grant Witness1 is a project to track the termination of NIH and NSF grants of scientific research agencies under the Trump administration in 2025. https://grant-witness.us
Post from John Dos Passos Coggin: The intrepid team of experts that made Climate.gov the pinnacle of digital climate resources is fighting back. With new partners and volunteers they are launching Climate.us, an independent, nonprofit successor to Climate.gov. Their first goal is to rescue the Climate.gov content, along with other critical federal climate information that’s gone missing, like the USGCRP’s Climate Literacy Guide, the CLEAN Collection for students and teachers, and the Fifth National Climate Assessment. Their second goal is to begin producing new content. They’re already on social media spreading the word and raising seed money at Donorbox. Join the fight for science today! https://lnkd.in/eKxRnivb
BioRender is unbeatable when it comes to scientific visualization… or is it? Here are some open-source alternatives. In general, open-source icons are free to use but are licensed under Creative Commons, which may require attribution. While BioRender employs professional artists to create its artwork, most open-source projects allow the community to submit icons. For this reason, the quality may not be as high, but the cost is much lower.
Mind the Graph was created in 2016 by Fabricio Pamplona, a Ph.D. scientist and specialist in scientific communication, and Leonardo Minozzo, an experienced and accomplished designer. Together, they created a tool for making simple, didactic, and beautiful science figures.
Bioicons is a library of free, open-source icons for biology and chemistry, with over 2700 icons across around 30 categories. Each icon has a license; many are CCO or BSD. For some licenses, the creator must be attributed in the figure caption or the acknowledgements. Many are in the public domain; for these, attribution or credit is not required but is appreciated. This project seems to have been created by Simon Duerr.
Open Science Art offers a comprehensive, open-access library of icons, 3D models, and illustrations for many scientific disciplines including biology, chemistry, physics and space science.
From their website: SciDraw is the work of Federico Claudi and Alex Harston. “SciDraw is a free repository of high quality drawings of animals, scientific setups, and anything that might be useful for scientific presentations and posters.” Users are not required to sign up to post a drawing, so submissions undergo a review and approval process before being published. Users are free to download, modify and use all drawings on the website, acknowledgment of the drawings’ authors and of Scidraw.io are appreciated. Each drawing has a DOI, many in Zenodo.”
Simplifed Science Publishing allows you to create your own professional scientific graphics with online courses and templates or you can buy banks of icons. They offer hundreds of vector graphics to create professional scientific designs using fully customizable templates. This service is not free but costs far less than BioRender.
2023.01.25 On the 25th of January, 2023, more than 50 female doctoral students met with Joël Mesot and members of the Executive Board to share testimonies about the challenges they face in their day-to-day activities, and to recommend measures for preventing, monitoring, and holding individuals accountable for inappropriate and disrespectful behavior at ETH. https://www.500womenscientistszurich.org/post/eth-president-meets-doctoral-students
Representatives of the three groups (Speak Up! in Academia, WiNS, and 500WS Zurich) that had initiated the petition, which had over 1300 signatures, to the ETH Zurich Vice President for Finance and the General Secretary of the ETH Zurich Executive Board. There were over 150 people at the assembly on ETH Zurich’s Polyterrasse to hand over the petition signed by almost 1500 people to ETH Leadership.
BioRender is a tool for creating professional-looking science figures in minutes using templates and over 20,000 stock icons from 30+ areas in the life sciences using a web-based, drag and drop interface. The following figure is one of many templates; each element in the template is a simple icon.
Icons
BioRender contains an immense library of science-themed, simple icons including: cell structures and types, anatomy, different biomolecules, lab equipment, membranes and many different species from the simple to the complex. Have your own data you want to include in the figure? You can drag and drop images from your computer’s file system onto the canvas, they’ll appear as icons. Need something that is not in the library? With a paid subscription, you can ask BioRender to create new icons.
The simple icons in the library can also be grouped into compound icons in the same way that objects can be grouped (and ungrouped) in most drawing programs. A third type of icon, the bio-brush is unique to BioRender.
One of my favorite features is the bio-brush. If an icon has a brush next to it, you can use the bio-brush feature to draw repeating sequences of the icon, complete with the ability to make curves. Imagine drawing a lipid bilayer, a layer of cells or a string of nucleosomes as easily as drawing a line. Drawings that would take hours in a normal drawing program can be done in seconds with BioRender. For an example, see this BioRender tutorial for a demonstration of the membrane brush and a vessel brush.
The Biorender Learning Hub has a lot of videos on topics such as design, learning, usage and customization. This in combination with the intuitive interface means that the user can make professional-looking figures in an afternoon. Another feature is the ability to make and present slides within the BioRender interface; shared work spaces are planned.
The free license gives you the right to use the figures you create for educational purposes and in grants. If you want to publish your figures in journals or use your figure for commercial purposes, you need to upgrade to the commercial license which is $35 per month for individuals or $99 per month for a group of up to 5 members (in October 2021). Institutional licenses are also available.
Are there any negatives? The interface is optimized for Chrome so if you’re not using Chrome, there may be some issues. The price is too steep to keep a permanent license if you don’t have a research budget. However, even a student can cough up 35 dollars to buy a month-long license to make their final figures right before submitting.
