Information School News

Research published by staff and students from the Information School can be accessed for free via the University’s open access repository, White Rose Research Online . HEFCE have just published a ‘Policy for Open Access in the Post-2014 Research Excellence Framework’ which calls for all research outputs to be made publically available through a repository.  The Information School has been committed to the principal of open access for some years, and in December 2013 almost 15% of the University’s content in White Rose Research Online was provided by the Information School.  At present, an ongoing project within the School is working to further expand the volume of research content which is available online through open access.  This has already dramatically increased the volume of the School’s research which is available online. Some recent additions of new publications include: Smith, J., Hall, M.M., Goodale, P., Clough, P. and...

Dr John Holliday of the Information School has been awarded the Royal Geographical Society GIScience Research Group Masters Dissertation prize for the dissertation completed in his recent MSc Geographical Information Systems at Leeds University.      His paper appeared in the recent edition of the Journal of Information Science which marked the 50 th anniversary of Information School and was guest edited by Professor Peter Willett of the Information School.

The Information School’s Chemoinformatics Research Group has released a paper which will help the European Medicines Agency to decide whether new orphan drugs should be granted licences.   Evaluation and supervision of medicines throughout the European Union is the responsibility of the European Medicines Agency.   One particular activity which the Agency is involved in is the licensing of orphan drugs – medicines which are designed to treat people with rare diseases.   This activity is currently carried out by a panel of human experts.   However the Chemoinformatics Research Group’s paper outlines computer techniques that could be used to help the panel in deciding whether or not a new orphan drug should be granted a licence.   The paper (Franco, P., Porta, N., Holliday, J. D. & Willett, P. “The use of 2D fingerprint methods to support the assessment of structural similarity in orphan drug legislation” Journal of Cheminformatics , 6:5, 2014) ca...

John Holliday has been awarded the Emma Walton Prize for his Masters degree at the School of Geography, University of Leeds. The Emma Walton Prize is awarded once a year to the postgraduate student with the best overall performance from the School of Geography.

The Sheffield conference on Chemoinformatics ( cisrg.shef.ac.uk/shef2013 ) is being held at The Edge and is being run by Val Gillet, John Holliday and Peter Willett on behalf of the Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society and the Chemical Structure Association Trust.  The conference has brought together over 140 delegates from industry and academia from across the globe to discuss the latest techniques in computer-aided drug discovery.  With over 75 oral and poster presentations and an exhibition from leading software companies, it has been a very busy but enjoyable three days.

The Call for papers has recently appeared for the 6th Joint Sheffield Conference on Chemoinformatics .  This major international meeting, which is again being co-sponsored by the Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society and by  the Chemical Structure Association Trust, will be held at The Edge, University of Sheffield, 22nd-24th July 2013.

Peter Willett attended the Internet Librarian International 2012 conference in Olympia, where he received the Jason Farradane Award on behalf of the School's Chemoinformatics Research Group (Val Gillet, John Holliday and Peter Willett). Next week he will be visiting the USA to give talks on "Introduction to chemoinformatics" at Fordham University and "Fusing database rankings in similarity-based virtual screening" at Rutgers University.

The Information School's Chemoinformatics Research Group has been awarded the 2012 UKeiG Jason Farradane Award , in recognition of its outstanding 40 year contribution to the information field. The prize is awarded to the three current members of the group,  Professor Val Gillet , Dr John Holliday and Professor Peter Willett . The judges recognised the Group's status as one of the world's leading centres of chemoinformatics research, a major contributor to the field of information science, and an exemplar in raising the profile of the information profession. The School has a long association with the Farradane prize. Its second recipient was long time member of staff Professor Mike Lynch in 1980.