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When do firms benefit from academic research?

The abstract:
Firms' access to academic discoveries through R&D collaborations has been shown to enhance their patent performance. However, increasing both internal and external R&D activities can lead to high knowledge redundancy and coordination costs. This paper examines what kind of R&D focus inside the firm will improve or reduce the benefits of R&D collaborations with universities. Our results show that technological recombination focus strengthens the relationship between university collaborations and patent performance, whereas scientific research focus weakens the relationship. These results also differ between young and old firms, implying that firms may shift their R&D focus according to their collaborative objectives.

Amazing! Your Smartphone Can Do Science!

Is there anything my smartphone can't do?
That smartphone in your purse or pocket isn’t just for viewing movies and checking Facebook. By putting data collection, visualization and learning in the palm of your hand, it’s helping to transform science education and open up unprecedented opportunities for citizen science.
For all of those that always wanted to science on the train instead of playing Angry Birds... read on!

Sustainable Software for Science

'Let's collaborate' is the daily mantra of open science advocates. But how? The first workshop on "Sustainable Software for Science" gives some answers from the infrastructure perspective. But read for yourself:
The first workshop on "Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experience," was held at the Supercomputing Conference in Denver, CO on November 17, 2013. This meeting was organized by the Software Sustainability Institute at the University of Edinburgh and the National Science Foundation to examine how we can create sustainable software platforms that can best serve the needs of scientific research.  
Follow the link to read more about software solutions for open science.

In the Internet era, research moves from professionals’ labs to amateurs’ homes

FOR THOUSANDS of ordinary people around the world, one of biology’s hardest problems is just a game. Both scientists and supercomputers have long struggled to predict the three-dimensional structures of the biological molecules called proteins. These structures are crucial to understanding proteins’ roles in fundamental cellular processes and disease, but predicting them is no easy task—which is why some researchers have turned to laypeople for help.


Harvard Magazine.

Opening Science to Society

From the abstract:
Cloud computing put up on established trends and offers a variety of services that can profit its customers, by means of providing quick access to their data, scalability, data storage, data recovery and guard against various hackers, and usage of the network and infrastructure conveniences for motivating the outlay exposed of the deliverance of services despite the fact that growing the speediness and suppleness with which services are organized.

Help raise awareness of how the FIRST Act will delay public access

Oppose Section 302 of the proposed FIRST Act
A discussion draft of the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology Act of 2013 (FIRST) currently being circulated would impose significant barriers to the public’s ability to access to taxpayer funded research by restricting federal science agencies’ ability to provide timely, equitable, online access to articles and data reporting on the results of research that they support. The proposed FIRST Act is not in the best interests of the taxpayers who fund the research, the scientists who make use of it by accelerating scientific progress, the teachers and students who rely on its availability for a high-quality education, and the thousands of U.S. businesses, both small and large, which depend on public access to stay competitive in the global marketplace. One provision of the bill – Section 302 – would undercut federal agencies’ ability to effectively implement the widely-supported White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Directive on Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research, undermine the public access program pioneered by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and put the U.S. at a severe disadvantage among our global competitors.
SPARC.

Push button for open access

Two medical students are helping to turn the dream of making scientific research papers freely accessible into a reality, using the internet of course Some say the meek will inherit the earth but in fact it will be the young. More especially, those young people who know their way around computer technology and who have sparks of imagination and creativity. The Guardian, Occams's Corner.
The Open Access Button.