Whenever I start with a paper, report or presentation I find myself doing the same literature search and environment scan…And can only find the ones that I can or allowed to access. I am pretty sure this is the case for many of you out there. The current publications page on openEHR Website is quite limited and not frequently updated. What about creating a wiki page or a common bookmarking system?
If there is enough enthusiasm (if any), I also suggest that we look at the Zotero Open Source project. It is extraordinary (believe me!) high quality, works as a plug-in to Firefox which is FOSS and a much better form of End Note. It is possible to create a repository (only-meta data with links to full-text; requires WebDAV) that we all can share and update.
I haven’t checked it out yet in detail yet, but it looks promising.
They have sufficient clout to make it happen (they are the skype people)
Some of the papers unfortunately cannot be made available on the openEHR website due to copyright limitations - depends on the journal (and sometimes the time passed since publication)
I would definitely recommend Zotero - this is what I use to store and format the references used in CKM. Mendeley looks very interesting, and perhaps better suited for joint reference libraries, but they do recognise that it is not as fully-featured as Zotero.
Zotero is indeed a great tool to maintain a publications database
locally. As far as creating an online database though, were visitors can
browse through relevant publications, search and download papers, i
would recommend Refbase. http://www.refbase.net/index.php/Web_Reference_Database
Registered users in Refbase can be organised into groups and upload
their publications in a variety of formats (endnote, bibtex, refman, etc)
A typical usage scenario would be to create a sub collection of papers
within the main library of Zotero with the relevant material one wants
to share in refbase. You then export this sub collection in bibtex and
upload it to refbase from where it is made available to everyone.
We have been using these two tools for some time now in our projects and
this workflow seems to be working.
I hope this helps.
All the best
Athanasios Anastasiou
Signal Processing and Multimedia Communications Research Group
University of Plymouth - UK
Hi Ian, yes I was pointing out to Zotero because I have been using it since a year now and every time I use it my admiration grows. I do not use such strong expressions to many software – including some openEHR tools
Sebastian yes I think we should only store meta-data about citations publicly with URL’s to full text. Then the people who has access (through their institution or personal account) can also download it with a single click. I checked the ZOtero site more carefully after I sent my message and found out that this is indeed provided by ZOtero freely – that is free hosting of meta-data and group access.
I’m involved in a group that is looking at the development of ePortfolios for students’ clinical attachments.
One of the issues we are addressing is the cost of providing clinical assessment and feedback in the ePortfolio. Students complain that they labourously document their activities and observations on an attachment, but get very little feedback on whether the amount, quality and variety of their experience is suburb/good/bad/unacceptable for the particular attachment. However giving the student this feedback requires a senior clinician to read the ePortfolio and comment - and this is too time consuming to happen in practice.
Question: Could openEHR allow students to document their clinical experience in a machine-process able form?
They could then get immediate feedback on how they compare to other students on the same attachment, and how the attachment compares to similar attachments done by other firms.
If the answer to the question is yes, any ideas on how to make this happen?
