World Science Forum in Budapest
Nearly 400 participants from 80 countries convened at the World Science Forum in Budapest last month as a follow-up on the World Science Forum held there in 1999. The recommendations issued from the meeting include: ensuring the inclusion of science in all alliances working for sustainable development; synergistically developing human potential and research infrastructure; having all knowledge holders bear ethical responsibility; including young scientists at each stage; having the entire scientific community craft a global ethical codex; encouraging each country's parliament to have a standing committee on science; and continuing to hold World Science Forum - Budapest meetings. On the final day of the meeting, which was also World Science Day (November 10, 2003), the formation of a new international network for young scientists was announced. The World Academy of Young Scientists (WAYS) was created to represent students and researchers from 15-40 years of age in the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities. The organization's goals are two-fold: to carry out high-quality scientific research and to actively participate in science policy and decision-making. The founding general assembly is tentatively scheduled to be held in late 2004 in Tunisia. For further information on WAYS, contact Diana Malpede at ways@sztaki.hu.

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Utilizing Alerting Services
As the amount of scientific information and the number of information sources continue to grow exponentially, it becomes increasingly difficult for a researcher to be well-informed on a number of fronts. Electronic alerting services have been developed to address the need for receiving filtered information. Your organization or institution may have access to subscription-based alerting services, but here we give a general overview of the free e-alerting services available to scientists and engineers around the world. It should be noted that some services allow you to specify keywords or other variables to confine the results to your area of interest, but others only offer broad topic options. Some countries may provide access to these types of alerting services as the does United Kingdom through its national datacenter, EDINA, which is available free of charge for academic use to members of UK tertiary education institutions. Most researchers spend a considerable amount of time scanning journals for the latest developments in their fields. Now with free registration, sites such as HighWire provide alerting services that can notify you when a new issue is available online or send you the table of contents. Furthermore, you can elect to be notified when an article fitting your author/keyword/journal search profile is published. BioMedCentral also offers e-mail delivery of tables of contents personalized according to the interests you have chosen. Many scientific societies such as the American Chemical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry have free alerting services for the journals they publish, and most commercial publishers do as well (e.g. Oxford University Press). PubCrawler scans daily updates to the NCBI Medline (PubMed) and GenBank databases so you are notified of new journal articles and genetic data pertinent to your research. Useful in a number of ways, e-mail alerts can also apprise you of funding opportunities. Both GrantsNet and Grants.gov can send you announcements about funding sources. Finally, you can sign up to receive notification when a new item of interest to you is posted on the Internet. For example, items tracked in Google can be monitored through the service called Google Alert.

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Cyber Summit Debate on Digital Divide
As part of the World Summit for the Information Society, a debate on the Digital Divide will be broadcast live on the Internet on December 11th from 11:30-13:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Watch the webcast or the BBC World Earth Report on television on December 13th at 8:10, 12:10 and 20:10 UTC. You can participate in this global event by e-mailing your questions to the debate moderator, Mishal Husain. Mishal will pose the most interesting and relevant questions to the distinguished panel representing governments, the United Nations, the information and communication technology industry and civil society. [Source: Bellanet Information Dissemination List]

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New Web Portal for U.S. Federal Grants
Those seeking U.S. federal grants are now able to browse for funding from 26 agencies at a new Web site, Grants.gov. The goal of the "Grants.gov initiative" is to provide one comprehensive listing of federal grants. This web portal will offer general information and secure processing of transactions and applications. [Source: Sci-Tech Library Newsletter]

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SciX Study on Scientific Publishing
The SciX Project is conducting an online survey on scientific publishing. Among other topics, it covers attitudes toward open access. The aim of the survey is to collect empirical data from readers of scholarly journals and conference proceedings as part of a study looking at the current situation of scientific publishing in the domains of architecture, engineering and construction information technology, and construction management & economics. The results will be compared to those from a similar study done three years ago. [Source: SPARC Open Access Newsletter]

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Science and Society Workshop
The St. Petersburg branch of the Euroscience Working Group on Technology Transfer is organizing an international workshop on science and society entitled "St. Petersburg Encounter: Tensions in Society" to be held on April 17-20, 2004, in St. Petersburg. They are currently soliciting abstracts for papers that would fall under one of six broad themes listed on the Web site. [Source: Euroscience News]

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Collaborators Sought to Help Measure Internet Performance
For the past six years, researchers at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) have been performing end-to-end Internet monitoring through the PingER project. Originally, this project was designed to evaluate the quality of Internet connectivity between SLAC and other high-energy physics institutions, but now PingER data has been used for multiple purposes, including: tracking network infrastructure changes, demonstrating the need for upgrades to a network and illustrating the difference in performance between developed and developing countries. SLAC is seeking to obtain a more internationally diverse group of monitoring hosts. If you are interested in participating in the PingER project, please see the Web site or contact Jerrod Williams. [Source: SciDev.Net]

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Did You Know?
In an effort to strengthen science and technology capacity within the U.S. State Department, the three-year pilot Jefferson Science Fellows Program (JSF) will be administered by the U.S. National Academies. Through this program, five experienced, tenured research scientists and engineers will serve one-year assignments with the State Department in Washington, D.C. or at U.S. missions abroad. After their one-year assignments, the fellows will return to their academic careers but serve as consultants for short-term projects over a five-year period. U.S. academic institutions that have signed a JSF Memorandum of Understanding with the U.S. Department of State may nominate up to two candidates each year. Nominations are due on January 10, 2004. [Source: ITRInews]

The organizing committee of the World Science Forum and one of the co-sponsors, the Raiffeisen Bank, invite young scientists from all countries of the world to write papers on the subject of "Science and Business." Specifically, Ph.D. students from all countries can participate by e-mailing a paper on one of the following subtopics: involvement of venture-capital investors in research-and-development projects; private and public investment in science; solutions and consequences; knowledge capital as a factor of economic growth; and science as a profitable investment. In addition to receiving cash awards, winners will be invited to a follow-up workshop of the World Science Forum in 2004. The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2004, and complete details are available online (see "permanent update" and then "call for papers").

The International Union for Pure and Applied Physics has announced its third edition of the pilot program of travel grants for women physicists from developing and eastern European countries to attend regional conferences and schools this fall. Approximately 25 winners will be funded at a maximum level of US$800 each. Applications for these grants must be received by February 29, 2004.

Through March 31, 2004, the Digital Youth Consortium is accepting submissions for the Global Junior Challenge. The purpose of this award is to identify and reward best practices on the use of information and communication technologies in (1) overcoming the Digital Divide between developed and developing countries, (2) education and training of young people, and (3) achieving equal opportunities between women and men in every sphere of their professional lives. The contest is open to all individuals as well as groups representing schools, universities, non-profit organizations, research centers and companies. [Source: Digital Dividend Digest]

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Upcoming Meetings
Focus on Access: a Workshop on Building Digital Collections and Services; Cape Town, South Africa; December 10 - 12, 2003.

Third Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI3); Geneva, Switzerland; February 12-14, 2004.

Early Stage Researcher Mobility in Europe: Meeting the Challenges and Promoting Best Practice; Lisbon, Portugal, February 25-27, 2004.

For more information on any of the programs mentioned in this newsletter, please contact:

Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
P. O. Box 13975, 3106 East NC Highway 54
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 USA
Telephone: +1-919-549-4691 or +1-919-547-5246
Fax: +1-919-547-5263
E-mail: international@sigmaxi.org