When we look to the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals, one of the first points which strikes us, is, that THEY GENERALLY DIFFER MUCH MORE FROM EACH OTHER, than do the individuals of any one species or variety in a state of nature.

Hey, welcome. Double click anywhere on the text to start writing. In addition to simple text you can also add text formatted in BOLDFACE, _italic_, and yes, math too: E = mc²! Add images by drag’n’drop or click on the “Insert Figure” button. OK I’ve just unlocked a block that Matthew’s editing. What now ?

Imagine an event generating multiple innovations in medical research in one weekend. Imagine an event giving spreadsheet-limited laboratory researchers a taste of what computers can _really_ do. Imagine an event where the powers of coding and analysis are combined with powers of biology, genetics and medicine to convert dry or unobtainable data into ground-breaking medical insight. And imagine it all done in a spirit of frenzied teamwork and friendly competition. This is HealthHack, a 48 hour hackfest in which medical researchers nucleate teams of brilliant, creative people to solve the data-processing problems faced by real researchers and real clinicians. The weekend opens on Friday evening with the problem owners pitching their ideas, problem and proposed solution, to the assembled hackers, followed by an hour in which hackers can approach problem owners with their questions and seek additional details. Hackers then choose which problem they are going to work on, and the assembled teams plan their assault and commence work on their application. Apart from going home (presumably) to sleep, the event runs all weekend. Sunday 4pm is _down tools_, and the teams then present their prototypes to everyone, with prizes for first place, second place, and _spirit of HealthHack_. Below is a sampling of the teams and their creations:

AbstractBlah blah blah

DATE Friday September 19, 2014 VENUE Talks in securing space within the Unimelb/VLSCI Science Gallery. As plan B we have secured space for workshops and the talks for this date: FOR TALKS IN THE AM 207 Bouverie Street - Theatre 1 FOR WORKSHOPS IN THE PM VLSCI space 207 Bouverie Street - B118 207 Bouverie Street - B113 TARGET PARTICIPANTS All science practitioners in open data open publishing (and those participating at ISBC2014)

INTRODUCTION As part of the Australian Geophysical Observing System (AGOS) the University of Melbourne has established a seismic monitoring network in Victoria's South Gippsland region, in order to better understand natural earthquake occurrence in one of Australia's most seismically active regions. To the end of 2014, the network comprised 8 surface seismic stations and 4 borehole instruments (Figure 1). In addition, the AuScope Seismometer in Schools (AuSIS) program has a stations at Sale and Rosebud. The first deployment of surface instruments occurred in the month prior to the M 5.2 Moe earthquake (2012-06-19:10:56). Following the main shock three additional surface stations (Fish Creek, Willow Grove, Loch) were deployed in 2012. In 2014, Somers was deployed. There are currently 8 surface instruments deployed in Gippsland. In October 2014, 3 borehole instruments were deployed along the Strzelecki hills, at depths of ~130 m. These instruments increase the spatial resolution of the Gippsland array, and offer a chance to monitor microseismicity that would otherwise go undetected and/or poorly resolved. in this note we highlight some of the features resolved by having the subsurface capability. An additional instrument (A346 on map) installed by a mining company at a depth of 1.3 km was integrated into our network, with this data also telemetered in real time.

BEYOND THE IMPACT FACTOR. Having been quite versed in the art of research 8 years post PhD, I have been very fortunate to witness a renaissance in publishing in two ways. First, I remember quite well during my PhD training (over 10 years ago), the process of preparing a manuscript for the highest ranked journal, submit, reject, reformat and submit to the next journal, reject, submit.....you get the story. Published manuscripts were usually in print form. The second method utilises the Internet and open access publishing. During that time, impact factor was the key metric in which a publishing house was measured (The agony and ecstasy of the impact factor). This evolved quickly into a measure of a researcher’s performance. There was active push to get manuscripts into journals with a high impact factor as it reflects positively on the authors involved. Over the course of my career, merit in using the impact factor to judge a study was questioned . These days, it is almost a profanity to even consider the Impact Factor as a measure of a manuscript’s value (Randy Schekman’s Piece on Nature, Cell Science and Occam’s Typewriter on Impact Factor). Believe it or not, I have heard a swear jar was enforced at a grant review panel, where whomever mentioned “Impact Factor” would contribute to the swear jar. Okay so Impact Factor is not relevant, so what is a good metric? What is a good measure of a published manuscript for the likes of major granting bodies and prospective employers to judge your performance by? Speaking to many in the field and to many of my mentors, I would say the jury is still out; there really isn’t a good metric to go by, but nonetheless there should be one. In preparing this little piece I have come across Eugene Garfield, it seems he is the pioneer of citation metrics and has written many commentaries on the history of the Impact Factor and on how it has been misused. There have been discussions on other metrics so-called altmetrics where page hits or PDF downloads for instance, are being considered as measures of research impact. Back to my inaugral, first author manuscript, I aimed my submissions to the major journals including _Science_, _Nature_, _Cell_, _Nature Structural Biology_, _Developmental Cell_ each time sacrificing some impact factor points (see Figure [fig:tour]). This was at my PhD supervisor’s guidance as we both thought of the body of research to be paradigm shifting at the time. I quickly won the boomerang award for the manuscript that came back the most times within the group (not exactly the prize worth singing a song about!). In the end, we settled on, what was at the time, a very new publishing house, the Public Library of Science (PLoS). “What is this PLoS my supervisor says with scorn, there is no impact factor and what is this open access business? No business if you ask me; how will they survive if you give everyone open access to their published papers?” I was sold on how PLoS came about with regard to it’s push for online access and publishing at the time. It took a little convincing (meeting the editor of PLoS at the time) for my superviosr to come around who settled on the analogy with the stockmarket, “well the impact factor can only go up with this one”. To make a long story short, my paper was published in _PLoS Genetics_ . It was an interesting finding to me and my supervisor, but wasn’t really to the editors of _Nature_ and _Science_. Today, there are many open access publishers, such as open access pioneers BioMed Central (BMC), who publish over 260 journals spanning all topics of biology and medicine, and paved the way for other publishers, such as PLoS. As a profession, we all have come to realise the benefits of open access. Even the more unscrupulous entities that prey on unsuspecting scientists, have embraced open access (Beall’s List of Predatory Open Access Journals.). Even the likes of _Nature_ and _Science_ have embraced open access. It’s great and makes research more accessible much quicker than conventional print-based avenues. Measures of _impact_ have evolved in the era of open access; however, they are only slowly being adopted by the important funding bodies. In fact it is a requirement by NIH in USA and more recently NHMRC and ARC in Australia, that government funded research should be published as open access.