The European Commission’s public consultation on the review of EU copyright rules: a response by the CREATe centre

This article presents the response of the Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (CREATe) to the consultation on reform of the EU copyright regime. Reviews the format of the consultation, notes the common problems in reporting data in such a format, and reproduces the consultation questions to which CREATe responded, together with a summary of its conclusions on topics including: (1) terms of copyright protection; (2) libraries and archives; (3) persons with disabilities; (4) remuneration of authors; (5) user-generated content; (6) respect for rights; and (7) data mining.

Point-and-shoot: rapid quantitative detection methods for on-site food fraud analysis – moving out of the laboratory and into the food supply chain

Major food adulteration and contamination events occur with alarming regularity and are known to be episodic, with the question being not if but when another large-scale food safety/integrity incident will occur. Indeed, the challenges of maintaining food security are now internationally recognised. The ever increasing scale and complexity of food supply networks can lead to them becoming significantly more vulnerable to fraud and contamination, and potentially dysfunctional. This can make the task of deciding which analytical methods are more suitable to collect and analyse (bio)chemical data within complex food supply chains, at targeted points of vulnerability, that much more challenging. It is evident that those working within and associated with the food industry are seeking rapid, user-friendly methods to detect food fraud and contamination, and rapid/high-throughput screening methods for the analysis of food in general. In addition to being robust and reproducible, these methods should be portable and ideally handheld and/or remote sensor devices, that can be taken to or be positioned on/at-line at points of vulnerability along complex food supply networks and require a minimum amount of background training to acquire information rich data rapidly (ergo point-and-shoot). Here we briefly discuss a range of spectrometry and spectroscopy based approaches, many of which are commercially available, as well as other methods currently under development. We discuss a future perspective of how this range of detection methods in the growing sensor portfolio, along with developments in computational and information sciences such as predictive computing and the Internet of Things, will together form systems- and technology-based approaches that significantly reduce the areas of vulnerability to food crime within food supply chains. As food fraud is a problem of systems and therefore requires systems level solutions and thinking.

Directional genetic differentiation and relative migration

Understanding the population structure and patterns of gene flow within species is of fundamental importance to the study of evolution. In the fields of population and evolutionary genetics, measures of genetic differentiation are commonly used to gather this information. One potential caveat is that these measures assume gene flow to be symmetric. However, asymmetric gene flow is common in nature, especially in systems driven by physical processes such as wind or water currents. As information about levels of asymmetric gene flow among populations is essential for the correct interpretation of the distribution of contemporary genetic diversity within species, this should not be overlooked. To obtain information on asymmetric migration patterns from genetic data, complex models based on maximum-likelihood or Bayesian approaches generally need to be employed, often at great computational cost. Here, a new simpler and more efficient approach for understanding gene flow patterns is presented. This approach allows the estimation of directional components of genetic divergence between pairs of populations at low computational effort, using any of the classical or modern measures of genetic differentiation. These directional measures of genetic differentiation can further be used to calculate directional relative migration and to detect asymmetries in gene flow patterns. This can be done in a user-friendly web application called divMigrate-online introduced in this study. Using simulated data sets with known gene flow regimes, we demonstrate that the method is capable of resolving complex migration patterns under a range of study designs.