ELN SLAS Electronic Laboratory Neighborhood

By Jeff Paslay, Ph.D.

The SLAS Mission in Action

At the United Nations (U.N.) Millennium Summit in 2000, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan introduced the Health InterNetwork, an initiative to improve access to information for health professionals, researchers, scientists and policy makers. The core elements of the project were content, Internet connectivity and capacity building. Within this framework, the Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) was launched in 2002 with some 1,500 journals including our own Journal of Biomolecular Screening (JBS) and Journal of Laboratory Automation (JALA).

In 2004, HINARI joined forces with three other related initiatives to form Research4Life. Today, more than 6,000 institutions in over 100 countries and territories in the developing world have free or low cost access to more than 17,000 peer-reviewed international scientific journals, books and databases provided by the world's leading science publishers through the Research4Life program. In addition to HINARI, the three other public/private partnerships fueling Research4Life include Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA), Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE) and Access to Research for Development and Innovation (ARDI).

SLAS is proud that its two official journals, JALA and JBS, are part of Research4Life’s effort to help achieve the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals. Last year, JALA was accessed 2,209 times and JBS was accessed 1,474 times by Research4Life users from publicly-funded non-profit institutions in 65 different low- and middle-income countries. The most visits came from Colombia (383), followed by Vietnam (322) and Ukraine (306).

By making available the best-in-class scientific research published in JALA and JBS through Research4Life, SLAS is living its mission, which is “to provide forums for education and information exchange to encourage the study of, and improve the science and practice of, laboratory automation and screening.” Reaching out to like-minded, but under-funded scientists in developing countries also speaks directly to the SLAS Strategic Plan goal of connecting the global community via SLAS content. In 2012, SLAS built on this foundation by extending full membership benefits to individuals in emerging economies at greatly reduced membership rates. On top of this, the SLAS Tony B. Student Travel Awards program routinely funds participation in our Annual Conference and Exhibition for about 50 students, graduate students, post-doctoral associates and junior faculty from around the world. At SLAS2013, they came from 12 different countries.

All members of the SLAS Biomolecular Sciences Section (BSS) have year-round, instant access to JBS Online. Members of the SLAS Laboratory Automation Section (LAS) have year-round, instant access to JALA Online. These are rich resources that we are proud to share with the world. We hope you take advantage of them by regularly browsing the tables of contents and the OnlineFirst sections, which present original scientific research ahead-of-print. In addition, you can conduct searches of all issues by keywords or author names, save searches and sign up for free search alerts.

05/20/2013