Gaps in the implementation of effective interventions impact nearly all cancer prevention and control strategies in the US including Massachusetts. To close these implementation gaps, evidence-based interventions must be rapidly and equitably implemented in settings serving racially, ethnically, socioeconomically, and geographically diverse populations. This paper provides a brief overview of The Implementation Science Center for Cancer Control Equity (ISCCCE) and describes how we have operationalized our commitment to a robust community-engaged center that aims to close these gaps. We describe how ISCCCE is organized and how the principles of community-engaged research are embedded across the center. Principles of community engagement have been operationalized across all components of ISCCCE. We have intentionally integrated these principles throughout all structures and processes and have developed evaluation strategies to assess whether the quality of our partnerships reflects the principles. ISCCCE is a comprehensive community-engaged infrastructure for studying efficient, pragmatic, and equity-focused implementation and adaptation strategies for cancer prevention in historically and currently disadvantaged communities with built-in methods to evaluate the quality of community engagement. This engaged research center is designed to maximize the impact and relevance of implementation research on cancer control in community health centers.

The Neotoma Paleoecology Database is a community-curated data resource that supports interdisciplinary global change research by enabling broad-scale studies of taxon and community diversity, distributions, and dynamics during the large environmental changes of the past. By consolidating many kinds of data into a common repository, Neotoma lowers costs of paleodata management, makes paleoecological data openly available, and offers a high-quality, curated resource. Neotoma’s distributed scientific governance model is flexible and scalable, with many open pathways for participation by new members, data contributors, stewards, and research communities. The Neotoma data model supports, or can be extended to support, any kind of paleoecological or paleoenvironmental data from sedimentary archives. Data additions to Neotoma are growing and now include >3.8 million observations, >17,000 datasets, and >9200 sites. Dataset types currently include fossil pollen, vertebrates, diatoms, ostracodes, macroinvertebrates, plant macrofossils, insects, testate amoebae, geochronological data, and the recently added organic biomarkers, stable isotopes, and specimen-level data. Multiple avenues exist to obtain Neotoma data, including the Explorer map-based interface, an application programming interface, the neotoma R package, and digital object identifiers. As the volume and variety of scientific data grow, community-curated data resources such as Neotoma have become foundational infrastructure for big data science.

In 1606 Philip II of Portugal (and III of Spain) granted to a faithful court official, the Portuguese nobleman Pedro Álvares Pereira, the captaincy of Sierra Leone in Guinea, subject to his establishing an effective settlement there. This was on the lines of previous royal grants of other areas of the Atlantic world—the fifteenth-century grants of the Portuguese Atlantic islands, the grants of segments of the coast of Brazil in the 1530s, and of the coast of Angola in the 1570s. These earlier grants had led to the extension of Portuguese domain, that is, conquista, confirmed in the earlier instances by settlement but the grant made to Pedro Álvares Pereira led to no permanent settlement at Sierra Leone and not even to Portuguese overrule of the African peoples of the district. A first attempt to carry out the terms of the grant, made in 1606 through the agency of a Jesuit missionary, Fr. Baltasar Barreira, lost its initial momentum because of a sudden decline in the fortunes of Pedro Álvares Pereira. In 1608 he fell out of favor at the court, accused of corruption and malpractice—a not uncommon happening in the jealously competitive arena of the Madrid court—and hence was unable to send ships and supplies to Sierra Leone to substantiate his grant. Eventually he returned to favour and between 1612 and 1616 tried again, but for reasons which are not entirely clear but apparently included the loss of agents in a marine disaster, he gave up the struggle and in 1621, just before he died, he relinquished the grant.