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Comment by DoofusOfDeath | Hacker News Reader

"Enabled by Oracle high-performance cloud computing, ..."

Anyone know why that phrase is in there? It sounds very much like product marketing, but I can't see why the researchers or this story's author would be motivated to promote Oracle.

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> Funding: ... This work received generous support from the Oracle Higher Education and Research program to enable cryo-EM data processing using Oracle’s high-performance public cloud infrastructure (https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/cloud-infrastructure) ...

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/09/18/scie...

Why this summary of the work includes it prominantly, rather than in the footnotes like in the original paper, I'm not sure. Perhaps it was a condition the authors had for contributing to the article. Or perhaps it was Oracle's PR that got them the article in the first place. There is a comment from Oracle later in the article.

Thanks. I didn't think to look in the original sciencemag.org article.

Also possible Oracle donated the resources with the stipulation that they get mentioned in any articles about the research.

"Should I acknowledge Oracle support for my research project work, for example, in publications or on websites? Please acknowledge the “Oracle for Research” program in any publications or on websites."

https://www.oracle.com/oracle-for-research/faq.html

Apparently pushed as a requirement for the "free" Oracle cloud resources researchers can apply for.

I think the medicalxpress article might have been pushed by Oracle PR?

The article itself includes Oracle in the acknowledgements, together with the various University of Bristol HPC systems used, and Archer.

Indeed, 'Medicalexpress' appears to be nothing more than reprints of press-releases about medical research. The PR teams of Bristol & Oracle probably coordinated on the authorship. This is nearly pure promotion, with a thin veneer of reporting-like language.

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