Kowabunga Dudes!

Howdy Peeps!

I’ve been turtley busy this month, spreading the open access message, staring in movies and partying like a dragon for the Chinese new year. Phew I’m exhausted! I’m glad I’ve got a new batch of clones to help me out, I even made a special video to announce their arrival.

If  you want to give a clone a good home head over to my Facebook page to find out how to get your flippers…er I mean hands on one.

Did you hear about the military rescue mission of some sea turtle hatchlings in the US? The little dudes were hanging halfway from their egg shells and needed a little help getting out. The U.S Air force and the Coastguards then drove the tiny tykes out to sea to catch up with the rest of the family. Heartwarming huh?

I visited Animal Garden again this month, because we’re turtley concerned about the SOPA bill and the RWA. If  these are passed in the USA it would be baaaad news for Open Access everywhere.  So if you live in the US make sure you make your opposition known to congress, and even if you’re elsewhere you can still make a fuss!

It’s not all bad news here. I celebrated the Chinese new year in style, with a little help from my clones,  in a specially made dragon. Check me out!

Oh and don’t forget to vote for BioMed Central for a Shorty Award in science! Well that’s all for now dudes, until next time, hang tight.

Happy New Year Gullivites!

The festive season has been and gone and now it’s time to take down the decorations and get on with some science!  I hope everyone had a good time, 2011 was certainly a year to remember but man have I got plans for number 12!  What did everyone do for New Year’s Eve?  I went to a fancy dress party in my best Hoff costume, but it seems I wasn’t the only one to have that idea.  My crab homies have finally decided to come out of their shells and introduce themselves to the world, and boy do they love Baywatch.

You might think that a crustacean with a chest wig is pretty wacky, but you ain’t seen nothing yet.  Check out this list of the craziest critters of 2011 including the terrifying zombie ants which my buddies at BioMed Central risked their brains to warn the world about!  In all seriousness though I’m kinda disappointed not to feature in that list myself.  A turtle that can write – and do science – surely that’s wackier than a one eyed shark!

So I mentioned in my last post that I was interviewed by AnimalGarden for a Panton Discussion.  If you don’t know what a Panton Discussion is then check out December’s entry.   Before Christmas there was only a sneak peak, but now you can see the full video and learn about the turtley awesome things that I do.  Here’s a big shout to Peter and the AnimalGarden crew for giving me my big break.  Finally the recognition I deserve!

AnimalGarden interviews Gulliver, the Open Access turtle from Peter Murray-Rust on Vimeo.

Inspired by my new celebrity status I’m almost ready to grace the world with my first ever YouTube video on my brand new channel.  There’s a hint in my interview as to what’s coming – see if you can guess what it is.

Right I’m off to chat to my agent and fraternize with the stars, peace out!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…

Oh the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so… Hello Gullivites!

Happy Holidays! Just a quick post today. It’s been a turtley cool week! I’ve been transformed into a movie star! Well just a YouTube video, which will be posted on my new channel, but I was interviewed this week by AnimalGarden for a Panton Discussion, how cool is that!

I had a special e-postcard made for the holidays and I got to wear my new costume, I like it so much I might stay in it all holiday.

Oh, did you hear about the tortoise that had 45 babies. Her name is Kali and she is an African Sulcata, one of the largest species of tortoise in the world. She lives at Linton Zoo in Cambridgeshire and had her diddy dudes in two separate hatchings in March and April. But who’s the daddy? No one knows! The zoo has four males and is not sure which one is the pater familias!

Well I have to go now, have a great holiday everyone! Speak to you all in the new year, enjoy the festivities, hang tight.

Crafty turtles!

Gullivites – I can’t believe it’s been a whole month since we last spoke…I’ve been very busy spreading the open access word around the globe, particularly in Africa after BioMed Central’s super successful Open Access Africa event! The feedback has been unbelievable and I can’t wait to get back there next year with a load more clones. 

Obviously I have been around for a long time now but it’s good to see my young apprentices are plotting their plan of action before even breaking out of their shells! The recent study also proved that those turtles who are growing deeper in the soil are able to speed up their own development…turtley awesome!

Meanwhile in America, someone was caught this week trying to smuggle some un-hatched eggs out of the country! Im sure the embryonic turtles were hatching some sort of revenge plot for when they decide to come out their shells!

In a completely different way, turtles are being driven away from Kenya too. My brothas and sistas are having to find new, safer places to live as all the human folk (tourists) are trashing our cribs (nesting sites). According to my homies at the WWF, the world population of marine turtles has declined by 80% in the last 50 years and if we’re not careful, they may be completely gone from eastern Africa in 50 years time!

That’s all for now folks – I’ll speak to you before the holidays. Peace out.

More free info, the very best of diabetic research and a personal plug!

Another busy week in the world of Gulliver and as always I’ve plenty of juicy open access updates to share with you guys.

First things first though, a little personal plug…I’m now on Google plus so add me to your circle please! My quest to ‘become the most popular turtle on Facebook’ has expanded. BOOM! I’m looking for total web domination (in the area of open access anyway!).

As you may know I recently got to hang out with some new friends at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana, during Open Access Africa 2011. Representatives from Google, British Medical Journal (BMJ), Department for International Development (DFID), Pan African Medical Journal and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa(UNECA) discussed open access in an African context and offered insights from library, technology and funding perspectives.

It was an awesome conference but I’m not gloating because for those of you who couldn’t join us you can check out all the presentations and images online in true open access spirit! We’ll also have videos of the presentations available soon.

SPARC is hosting an open access roundup today through the Open Access Week Network. There’s still time to register for this free webinar, if you’re quick. I hope they remember Open Access Africa 2011!

It was World Diabetes Day yesterday. Did you know that type 1 and type 2 diabetes affect 2.8 million people in the UK? The theme of World Diabetes Day was: “Diabetes Education and Prevention”.  BioMed Central’s journals Cardiovascular Diabetology and Diabetology and Metabolic Syndrome are loaded full of great research that show developments in their fields.

Paywall baad…Open Access goooood!

Happy Halloween Folks! As you may have guessed from the title of this post, I’ve transformed… into FrankenGulliver! or Gulliverstein whichever way you prefer, just my take on Frankenstein’s monster for Halloween.

It was Open Access Week last week and I’ve been super busy promoting open access across the globe. I’ve just returned from Ghana where I was taking part in Open Access Africa 2011.

I had a turtley cool time and made lots of new pals. You can read all about it and join the discussion here, and don’t forget to check out the photos on Facebook. I also visited the good ol’ US of A this week, and there are some great photos on my Facebook page of me and my new mates at Texas A&M University Libraries.

It’s the last day of Breast Cancer Awareness month, and here at BioMed Central we’ve come over all pink. That’s because Friday the 28^th October was ‘wear it pink’ day for Breast Cancer Campaign and I donned a pink shell for the occasion. We’ve had lots of research published in our journal Breast Cancer Research this month including potential causes, risk factors and even a potential new breast cancer therapy! It’s not too late to join in the campaign so check out the  Breast Cancer Campaign website.

I hope you all have a spooky Halloween. Until next time gullivites! Until next time… Mwahahahahaha!

Celebrate good times…

Gullivites – it’s been a while since I have shared the lo-down with you all…I hope you’ve all had a turtley awesome couple of weeks. I am sure you have missed me, but take comfort in the fact that I have been spreading the turtle word around the globe and am happy to report back to you on the kindness I have seen.

I’m sure you are all aware that on 4^th October it was World Animal Day! This occasion allows people to

celebrate animals and the role they play in humans lives – back at BioMed Central HQ we refer to it asWorld Gulliver Day J. As a result of people’s hard work raising awareness of the day and of endangered species as a whole, my brothas and sistas throughout the world are being preserved.

Great efforts are being taken at a centre in Pramuka Island, Indonesia, where I have a few cousins, to boost their sea turtle population. Not only are the kind people at the centre releasing turtles into the sea, they are also looking after my homies that have been injured by fishing nets.

Alongside celebrating World Animal Day, it was also World Space Week! And to celebrate, I became the first turtle to successfully navigate the globe…check out the pics from my trip.

 

Apart from spreading the turtle message throughout the world, I have been enjoying my celebrity as the open access turtle and it has finally landed me a starring role in a production!  Here’s a teaser to whet your appetite but I will explain everything in greater detail next time.

Have a great week my friends!

Knock Your Socks Off!

Put em up, put em up! I can get feisty sometimes, you know. ‘I got punk,’ or so my homies say, but I’m definitely not as plucky as these guys. Check out these fighting ants covered in a new article by BMC Ecology.

I came across this Open Access Timeline recently and it blew my mind. Have a look at all the OA developments that have happened in just 20 years – a nice encouragement ahead of Open Access Week 2011, my favourite time of year. Good going guys, let’s keep up the good work.

My clones travel far and wide to bring open access fun to all my friends. I like to keep an eye on these guys and what better way to do that than with a few pics? Clone #3422 has been hanging out in Jardín Botánico Medellín in Colombia with Catalina Urquijo, #2431 swung by the Eifel Tower in Paris and #126 visited Brussels in Belgium with Robert Cameron. If you want to show off your Gulliver photos just post them to my Facebook page.

Speaking of travelling, I’ve just come back from Washington DC. Unfortunately the Obama’s weren’t free for tea and scones but I did get to help out at Beyond the Genome 2011 which focused on cancer genomics, the human microbiome and exome and genomic sequencing.  We’ve just announced dates and venue for Beyond the Genome 2012!

It’s not all work here at BioMed Central, I took a break out of my busy mascotting schedule to take on our rivals and friends at Nature Publishing Group in a 10km Fun Run with some of my work buddies. We smashed some great times. Obviously you can guess who came first…me!

Turtley Cool Week!

G’day there peeps! So it’s been a busy week at Biomed central, lots of super cool research! Including new research that shows how some birds such as pigeons, flamingoes and emperor penguins, produce milk like secretions called ‘crop milk’ to feed their young, the study was published by the cool dudes at BMC Genomics and shows that the ‘milk’ has a similar function as mammalian milk, like all you humanoids out there. It has even been suggested that knowing the genes involved in the process could lead to increasing production of crop milk in birds, so we could all enjoy a glass of pigeon milk, though I don’t think it will be marketed for turtles.

Aargh Landlubbers! It was international talk like a pirate day this week and I decided to join in on the fun, talking like a pirate all day. Oh boy was I sick of saying “Ahoy!”  But I loved dressing up in my specially made costume! (it’s not easy when you have a shell y’know)

In turtle news, researchers are trying to piece together a turtely jigsaw puzzle:  a 65 million year old turtle that was unearthed in New Jersey, USA. This humpty dumpty is being carefully put back together after breaking into hundreds of pieces over the many years it lay hidden. The discovery could help provide insight into turtle evolution, and finding  answers about how we are related to other species.  Turtley cool!

We’ve had some special visitors this month, all the way from the land down under. That’s right it’s Save the Koala Month, and I’ve been meeting some cuddly new friends. The Australian Koala Foundation have some great ideas for fundraising, you can even adopt a Koala! Check out my Facebook page to see more pictures of me and my new friends.

Don’t forget, Open Access Week  is not too far away and this year they plan to make it bigger than ever! So make sure you’re prepared.

That’s all from me for this week peeps, I hope you have a turtley great weekend!

Turtley Turtle News!

So, it’s not great news for turtles it appears this week. Reports of mass starvation, fishing deaths and poachers! Oh it’s too much, I’m turning green! Oh y’all know what I mean. However it’s not all bad news peeps, the use of turtle excluder devices has helped to reduce mortality rates of sea turtles accidentally captured by fishermen in trawling nets and long lines. More good turtle news, as a brave young turtle named ‘Sara’ survives a malicious spear attack to the head. She was found by some nice peeps, who took her to Florida Keys Turtle Hospital, where they saved Sara’s life. Luckily she made a full recovery and was released this month.

In other news, a new species of dolphin has been discovered in Australia!  Well… they’ve been discovered to be a different species, not discovered to have existed. See they thought they were one of the existing species of bottlenose dolphins,  but they’re actually a totally different species, how cool is that?! They named them Tursiops australis, the common name being Burrunan dolphin, which come from an Aboriginal word that means ”large sea fish of the porpoise kind”, nice and simple, I like it.

Awesome news for open access! An EU Funded study “An Open Access future? Report from the eurocancercoms project” found that researchers are actually in favor of open access publishing, and that three quarters of researchers surveyed  had published work in open access journals in the past. Other researchers complained that a lack of open access to data hindered their work, and 88% of respondents said they thought that publicly funded research should be open to all, without any barriers. It’s good to know the majority of researchers agree with me!

I’ve had some great turtley adventures this week,  and even made some new friends. Check out my Facebook page to see more!

That’s all for now, have an awesome weekend!