Curate Now

Below are some opportunities for researchers to apply their knowledge and expertise to a variety of biocuration projects, Hackathons & peer review opportunities.

This page is regularly updated as we become aware of other curation opportunities in biocuration.
Last update: 25th June, 2024

Curation opportunities

  • ACKnowledge: The Author Curation to Knowledgebase (ACKnowledge) project is designed to streamline the integration of author contributions into biological knowledgebases. The system, in use by WormBase for curating C. elegans literature, utilizes text mining and machine learning methods to identify entities and data types in papers for authors to validate. If you are interested in knowing more contact us!
  • Biomappings: Community curated and predicted equivalences and related mappings between named biological entities that are not available from primary sources. To know more, click here.
  • Bioschemas – a schema markup specification that extends the W3C standard of schema.org to covers the biological data. The approach allows the datasets to be discovered by search mechanism such as the Google Dataset search. The specificity of the Bioschemas profile that allows specifying Gene, Protein, MolecularEntity, and ChemicalSubstance at the schematic level is the foundation for a search engine to go directly to the data. This is also much needed in the time of COVID-19. For all the available profile types, please click here. For tutorials, please click here.
  • CIViC is an open source, public domain resource for community curation of clinical interpretation of variants in cancers. Contributions from the community are welcome. To learn more about how to become an editor and help moderate updates to CIViC, click here.
  • ClinGen curation– Interested in volunteering to curate for ClinGen or know someone who is? You can know more about the Curation Activities at ClinVar here, and also access education materials and tools. Take this brief survey to tell them more about your interests, expertise, and desired level of involvement. Background training will be provided. For questions contact volunteer@clinicalgenome.org.
    The ClinGen Biocurator Working Group launched the Biocurator Educational Materials page, a publicly available resource with recorded presentations from the ClinGen Biocurator Working Group calls. Learn more about all of ClinGen’s educational resources and training opportunities here.
    If you are interested in Variant Curation, please fill out their volunteer survey.
  • DisProt: database of manually curated annotations of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) and regions (IDRs) from literature. To submit new annotations to the database click here and select the “Submit a new annotation tab“.
  • Evidence and Conclusion Ontology (ECO): the ECO ontology contains terms (classes) that describe types of evidence and assertion methods. For information on how to submit new terms requests to ECO please click here.
  • FAIRsharing COVID-19 collection – help FAIRsharing curate metadata on the knowledgebases, repositories and standards related to COVID-19 research. You can do this by adding resources to a spreadsheet or to FAIRsharing directly.
  • Human Disease Ontology (DO): Become a DO contributor !! The DO provides standardized human disease terms within an etiology-based disease classification integrating genetic and environmental mechanistic models.Your contributions to the DO will enhance our representation of rare, common and complex human diseases. Submit new disease terms and term update requests in DO’s GitHub, click here.
  • PanelApp – a database for gene panels for use in disease diagnosis that enables crowdsourcing of expert reviews. Experts can provide reviews of genes implemented in disease. To become a PanelApp reviewer, register here.
  • PomBase – provides Canto, for the community curation of fission yeast  phenotypes, gene ontology (GO_ terms, protein modifications and interactions. Canto is a generic tool and can be configured for any species. A species independent version for the community curation of GO data, and a version for the community curation of  both GO and pathogen host interaction phenotypes (in collaboration with PHI-base) will be made available soon. Try the demo version of Canto to curate GO terms, phenotypes, interactions and protein modifications.
  • REACTOME – Become a REACTOME contributor. REACTOME is an open-source, open access, manually curated and peer-reviewed pathway database. You will be credited with authorship or reviewership for all of your contributions.
  • UniProt Curation – The UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB) contains a vast amount of protein sequence and function information. Expert curation in UniProtKB includes a critical review of experimental data from the literature as well as predicted data from sequence analysis tools. Community curation is welcome, click here for instructions. More info on how to contribute both literature references and annotation to UniProt is available from this EMBL-EBI webinar.
  • WikiPathways – is a database of biological pathways maintained by and for the scientific community. The WikiPathways Academy provides training to become a pathway author and contributor.
  • Yeast genome – Submit information to the Saccharomyces Genome Database about your published paper.

Hackathons

  •  openTECR, the open database for thermodynamics of enzyme-catalyzed reactions is holding a hackathon in the week of December 11th to 15th, 2023, online and around the globe, to hack on our data and code. Here are some general information, overview of the task areas, and the registration survey. It would be great to see you there, and if you could spread the word to potentially interested other people. 

General Guidelines and Instructions

  • Ontology Lookup Service (OLS) instructions – The Ontology Lookup Service (OLS) provides access to over 150 public biomedical ontologies. You can use OLS to search and visualize ontologies, and an API is also provided for programmatic access. Ontologies provide standard terminology for describing data that help us integrate and analyze data.
  • Review curated content in your favorite papers. Further instructions here.

Peer review opportunities

Share your opportunities

Thank you to everyone who has suggested curation opportunities so far. To share additional opportunities, please send the information to: isb@biocurator.or

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