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The article discusses developments in open-access research in Great Britain. Topics mentioned include the open-access publishing of research articles by publicly funded scientists, collaboration between publishers, funders, and researchers on the costs and challenges of open-access publishing, and key barriers to open-access research such as open-access licenses and use of single digital identifier.

The article discusses a move by Great Britain government funding agencies requiring grant applicants to show how they calculated the number of animals needed to make the results of an experiment statistically robust. Topics discussed include the responsibility of journals to ensure that the research published is reported in sufficient detail and the importance of ensuring that the power of an animal experiment suits its purpose for funders and researchers to contribute.

The contribution of rare and low-frequency variants to human traits is largely unexplored. Here we describe insights from sequencing whole genomes (low read depth, 7×) or exomes (high read depth, 80×) of nearly 10,000 individuals from population-based and disease collections. In extensively phenotyped cohorts we characterize over 24 million novel sequence variants, generate a highly accurate imputation reference panel and identify novel alleles associated with levels of triglycerides (APOB), adiponectin (ADIPOQ) and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDLR and RGAG1) from single-marker and rare variant aggregation tests. We describe population structure and functional annotation of rare and low-frequency variants, use the data to estimate the benefits of sequencing for association studies, and summarize lessons from disease-specific collections. Finally, we make available an extensive resource, including individual-level genetic and phenotypic data and web-based tools to facilitate the exploration of association results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Screening mammography aims to identify breast cancer at earlier stages of the disease, when treatment can be more successful 1 . Despite the existence of screening programmes worldwide, the interpretation of mammograms is affected by high rates of false positives and false negatives 2 . Here we present an artificial intelligence (AI) system that is capable of surpassing human experts in breast cancer prediction. To assess its performance in the clinical setting, we curated a large representative dataset from the UK and a large enriched dataset from the USA. We show an absolute reduction of 5.7% and 1.2% (USA and UK) in false positives and 9.4% and 2.7% in false negatives. We provide evidence of the ability of the system to generalize from the UK to the USA. In an independent study of six radiologists, the AI system outperformed all of the human readers: the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC) for the AI system was greater than the AUC-ROC for the average radiologist by an absolute margin of 11.5%. We ran a simulation in which the AI system participated in the double-reading process that is used in the UK, and found that the AI system maintained non-inferior performance and reduced the workload of the second reader by 88%. This robust assessment of the AI system paves the way for clinical trials to improve the accuracy and efficiency of breast cancer screening.

The authors argue that proposals for British higher education funding should recognize the value of higher education. Topics include the proposed abolition of the government body Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), the continuation of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), and case studies showing the impact of academic research on society.

The authors argue that scientists should advocate for the creation of marine parks in order to preserve the preservation of ocean life. Topics include the preservation of the sea-horse populations in Studland Bay in England, attempts to create marine conservation zones (MCZs) on the coast of Great Britain, and proposed marine reserves around the British territories Chagos Islands and Pitcairn Islands.

An introduction is presented which discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the British public attitudes toward chemists and chemistry, and the retraction of a same-sex marriage study.

The article focuses on opinion polling during the 2015 British Parliamentary elections, commenting that polling firm Survation correctly predicted the result of the election but buried the result because the results appeared out of line with every other poll, and reflects on the role of anomalous data in scientific research.

A review of article discussing a 2011 report on earthquakes caused by hydraulic fracturing in Great Britain by Huw Clarke and colleagues, published in the periodical "Geophysical Research Letters" in 2014, is presented.