Hello!

This is the fourth quarter newsletter for the International Society for Biocuration, and the first newsletter from your new 2018/2019 ISB Executive Committee.

Welcome to the New Executive Committee!

I would like, on behalf of all the membership, to welcome our new committee members, Jane Lomax, Fredric Bastian and Mary-Ann Tuli, to their roles and to thank the outgoing members, Cecilia Arighi, Suzanna Lewis and Zhang Zhang for all their hard work. We look forward to a busy 12 months with both the  Biocuration Career Award and the Exceptional Contribution to Biocuration Award to be made, and conference travel fellowships, microgrants and exchange fellowships to be decided upon. We hope you will contact us with ideas on how we enhance the profile of Biocuration in the scientific community and take the opportunity to talk to members of the EC if you are attending the 2019 Biocuration conference in Cambridge UK.

We look forward to working with you, and for you, in 2018/19

Sandra Orchard, Chair

The Executive Committee

Submit your nominations for 2019 Biocuration Awards

In 2019 ISB will give two different awards to people who have made a significant impact in the field of biocuration. We welcome your nominations! The deadline is January 04, 2019.

More info here.

Postgraduate Certificate in Biocuration

This October, the University of Cambridge, UK was pleased to welcome its first cohort of students on the Postgraduate Certificate in Biocuration.

This Master’s level award is offered by the Institute of Continuing Education (ICE) and is completed in one year.

The course has been been designed to provide a route for new biocurators to develop a knowledge of the field and the skills required to work within it; provide those already working in the field with the opportunity to expand their knowledge and current skill set, and to provide a formally recognized qualification for Biocuration.

Most of the three module course is delivered via the VLE (Virtual Learning Environment), with a 3 or 4 day face-to-face workshop providing more hands on learning.

More information can be found here.

The first 3 day workshop took place at the magnificent Madingley Hall in Cambridge, UK in October, and introduced the students to the Principles of Biocuration. The workshop gave the students a chance to get to know each other and many of the course tutors. 

Microgrant Report: CIViC-hosted hackathon and curation workshop

By Kilannin Krysiak

The second CIViC-hosted hackathon and curation workshop was held as an open-format one and a half day pre-conference to the 2018 ASHG meeting in San Diego. Over 50 Attendees were present representing over 20 organizations and institutions from multiple countries. Session topics were suggested by attendees and CIViC team members and covered coding (hackathon) and issues in cancer variant representation and curation.

Read more here.

 Microgrant Report: 9^th annual International Conference on Biological Ontologies (ICBO2018)

Ontologies for Health, Food, Nutrition and Environment: A partnership with BIG-Data and Analytics

By Pankaj Jaiswal

Oregon State University hosted the 9th annual International Conference on Biological Ontologies (http://icbo2018.cgrb.oregonstate.edu). The theme of the ICBO2018 was Ontologies for Health, Food, Nutrition and Environment A partnership with BIG-Data and Analytics. ICBO2018 was a marquee event celebrating the 150^th anniversary of the founding of Oregon State University (OSU150).

ICBO2018 concluded with a vote of thanks and the announcement for 10^th ICBO (ICBO2019) to be held at the University at Buffalo, New York, USA. More info will be shared when it is available.

Read the full microgrant report on ICBO2018 here.

Announcement: 21st Genomic Standards Consortium Meeting

Dates: May 20-23, 2019

GSC 21st 3-day meeting will highlight the nexus of genomic standards and innovative methods in genomics. The meeting in charming Vienna will bring together people from many fields, including microbiology, microbial ecology, bioinformatics, medicine and system biology.

Registration will open January 14th, 2019

Recommendations for sustainable genomics and genetics databases for agriculture

The AGBioData Consortium is made up of scientists from 32 genetic, genomic and breeding databases in the agricultural sector.  A list of member databases can be seen here:  https://www.agbiodata.org/databases.

This group is developing standards and best practices that can be adopted uniformly across agricultural databases to increase both interoperability and user experience.  Focus areas include biocuration, metadata and persistence, ontologies, database platforms, programmatic access to data, and communication. A recent publication outlining AgBioData consortium recommendations is here: https://academic.oup.com/database/article/2018/2018/bay088/5096675

​The challenge with standards and best practices is not defining them, but implementing them. They will be focused on implementation of standards and best practices in the next few years.

Congratulations to Ruth Lovering!

Ruth Lovering was recently promoted to a Professorial Research Fellow at UCL!

Ruth serves as the Lead of the UCL Functional Gene Annotation, a group which provides literature curation to support Gene Ontology (GO) and protein interaction data annotation. The Functional Gene Annotation team also teaches a bioinformatics module for the UCL Genetics Institute’s MSc in Genetics of Human Disease and an annual workshop on GO and other bioinformatics resources.

Save the date!
12th International Biocuration Conference

West Road concert hall in Cambridge UK will provide the location of the 12th International Biocuration Conference in April 7-10, 2019. This is an ideal forum for biocurators, developers and researchers to collaborate and promote their work within this active and growing community. Participants and submissions are welcome from academia, government and healthcare organizations, and industry. Please check biocuration2019.org, or follow #biocuration2019 on Twitter, for the latest information and details on how to register.

Register here

Abstract submissions and workshop proposals are due December 21st 2018. More info here.

Funding Opportunities from the ISB

The ISB offers microgrants to sponsor local and regional short meetings of ISB members to foster synergy of their work efforts. We’d like to promote requests for funding that address issues surrounding diversity or accessibility.

To promote collaboration and exchange between biocuration groups ISB offers fellowships. The fellowship will fund the visit of a biocurator to another laboratory or organization with extensive experience in biocuration.

Share your news and ideas with the ISB

Have an upcoming paper that you’d like to highlight for the ISB community? Let us know.

We welcome your feedback and ideas. Please contact us at intsocbio@gmail.com

Hello! This is the third quarter newsletter for the International Society for Biocuration, a series providing with the latest information on activities and ideas contributed by our community members

Luana Licata’s recap from ISB fellowship visit to EMBL-EBI

By Luana Licata

The short-term fellowship conferred by the International Society for Biocuration (ISB) has given me the opportunity to spend, as a visitor, two weeks, from the 2nd to the 13th of July 2018, at the EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, UK.

At the EMBL-EBI, I have been hosted by the IntAct team and I have worked with the Protein Function Team (EMBL-EBI) and the Gene Annotation Team of the Centre for Cardiovascular Genetics (UCL, London) and with the Molecular Interaction Team (IntAct, EMBL-EBI). Read more here.

Microgrant funding for GCCBOSC 2018

The first joint event of the Galaxy Community Conference and the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (GCCBOSC 2018) was held from June 25-30 at Portland’s Reed College, and the conference received a microgrant from the ISB to help offer childcare at the conference.  To read more, go here

Hackathons for Education and Rapid Prototyping, Research, and Production

By Ben Busby

Solving a scientific problem or building a new bioinformatics tool in just three days – sound impossible? It’s not, when you bring together groups of participants with diverse backgrounds and skill sets in an NCBI-style hackathon! Unlike competitive hackathons, in which many teams vie to create the best solution to a single problem, NCBI-style hackathons are cooperative, with each team tackling its own project, and sharing ideas and expertise with other teams. Participants have ranged from undergraduates to biomedical librarians to front-end developers to senior bioinformaticians, and over the course of 30 hackathons, they’ve developed over a hundred products. They’ve also benefited from the opportunity to learn from and network with their teammates, and the gratification of (hopefully!) creating a cool new tool or resource that can be shared with the scientific community. Since hackathons bring together participants from varied subject matter and computational backgrounds, who typically wouldn’t collaborate otherwise, teams are able to come up with novel and unique solutions that wouldn’t likely come out of a more traditional scientific setting.

If you’re interested in participating in a hackathon, check out the list of upcoming hackathons happening all over the United States (and the world)! No hackathon happening near you? Run your own! A few tips for planning a successful hackathon:

• Be realistic about selecting projects – be sure to pick a problem that can feasibly be solved in three days.
• Make sure to keep your participants fed (and caffeinated) to keep energy and productivity up.
• Document your work and make it open source so that others can benefit from your work.
• Most importantly, have fun and meet some new people!

If you’re interested in learning more about hackathons or seeing examples of projects, visit the Biohackathons page or the Hackathons channel at F1000 Research.

ELIXIR Resources for Biocurators

by Peter McQuilton on behalf of ELIXIR

ELIXIR, an intergovernmental organisation that brings together life science resources from across Europe, has a lot to offer biocurators from across the globe. The goal of ELIXIR is to coordinate these resources so that they form a single infrastructure that makes it easier for scientists to find and share data, exchange expertise, and agree on best practices. ELIXIR activities are grouped into five platforms (Compute, Data, Tools, Training and Interoperability), which are developing a range of bioinformatics services and resources. The Interoperability Platform offers a number of useful resources:

• FAIRsharing (https://www.fairsharing.org) – A manually curated registry of databases (both repositories and knowledgebases), the standards they use (reporting guidelines, ontologies, identifier schema, models and formats), and the funder and journal data policies that recommend their use.
• Identifiers.org (https://www.identifiers.org) – a universal identifier resolution service for data identifier schemes in the life sciences.
• Bioschemas.org (https://www.bioschemas.org) – an extension of schema.org that allows the detailed mark-up of biological datasets, data repositories, training and more. Marked-up webpages are used by ELIXIR services and by the new Google Dataset Search Tool.

In addition, those interested in bioinformatics training can use the ELIXIR Training portal, TeSS (https://tess.elixir-europe.org/). TeSS brings together training materials and events from Europe and beyond and links them to other resources within the ELIXIR infrastructure.

Visit the ELIXIR catalogue of services to find out about the full range of resources available through ELIXIR: www.elixir-europe.org/services. For more information about the ELIXIR Platforms visit: https://www.elixir-europe.org/platforms/

The new ISB-TeSS training widget

By Peter McQuilton

Working with the ELIXIR TeSS Training and Events Portal (https://tess.elixir-europe.org/)  and the GOBLET training organisation (https://www.mygoblet.org/), we have added a new widget to the ISB website.

This widget calls the TeSS API directly to provide the latest information on training materials and events around the world. If you have a training event or training materials you would like to add to the widget (which will also mean that material is listed on TeSS and GOBLET) you can add it to the TeSS website here: https://tess.elixir-europe.org/about/registering

Save the date!
12th International Biocuration Conference

West Road concert hall in Cambridge UK will provide the location of the 12th International Biocuration Conference in April 7-10, 2019. This is an ideal forum for biocurators, developers and researchers to collaborate and promote their work within this active and growing community. Participants and submissions are welcome from academia, government and healthcare organisations, and industry. Please check biocuration2019.org, or follow #biocuration2019 on Twitter, for the latest information and details on how to register.

Note that the paper submission deadline for inclusion in the Biocuration virtual issue of Database is October 31st 2018.

Executive Committee Elections

The Executive Committee Elections will be held this fall for 4 vacancies. The following EC member is up for re-election:

• Sandra Orchard

The following EC members will be stepping down from the EC:

• Cecilia Arighi
• Suzanna Lewis
• Zhang Zhang

Candidates will be announced on the website by September 28th. The election will run from October 01-08, 2018. Only ISB members are able to vote. More info here: https://www.biocuration.org/isb-ec-elections-2018

Funding Opportunities from the ISB

The ISB offers microgrants to sponsor local and regional short meetings of ISB members to foster synergy of their work efforts.

To promote collaboration and exchange between biocuration groups ISB offers fellowships. The fellowship will fund the visit of a biocurator to another laboratory or organization with extensive experience in biocuration.

Share your news and ideas with the ISB

Have an upcoming paper that you’d like to highlight for the ISB community? Let us know.

We welcome your feedback and ideas. Please contact us at intsocbio@gmail.com

The election of the new International Society for Biocuration Executive Committee (ISB EC) will be held in October 2018. The Executive Committee is composed of nine (9) members, each with a 3-year term. Being a member of the Executive Committee is a great way to become directly involved with the work of our society, and contribute to the decisions that are taken on behalf of the biocuration community. We would like to encourage all members interested in running for election to get involved in the process.

Serving on the ISB EC minimally involves attending monthly teleconference meetings (1 hour in length) and following up on any action points from meetings, as well as promoting the ISB’s activity to members and non-members. Examples of activities performed by EC members include reviewing micro-grant submissions, preparing call for participation for hosting Biocuration meetings, preparing materials for ISB election, monitoring ISB mail and website. There are specific positions such as Chair, Secretary and Treasurer that will require a larger time commitment, as they will be in charge of leading the steps of the executive committee and by extension the membership.

This year, there are four (4) open positions, as the terms of Sandra Orchard, Cecilia Arighi, Suzanna Lewis and Zhang Zhang will come to completion. (The current ISB EC members are here.)

2018 Electoral Process

A) The Nominating Committee:
A Nominating Committee (NC) has been formed to oversee the electoral process, to review applications, and establish the final list of candidates. We are very grateful for their assistance with the execution of this election. The members of the 2018 Nominating Committee are:

• Mike Cherry (Chair)
• Fiona McCarthy
• Lilly Winfree
• Sue Bello
• Luana Licata

B) Instructions to Candidates: 

1. If you would like to run for a position on the Executive Committee, you must first register your intent with the NC emailing isbelection@gmail.com
2. Please fill out this form by 31 August 2018, which includes a ‘statement of intent‘, a brief biographical sketch, and a ‘conflict of interests‘ statement describing any activities, memberships of other associations, editorial positions on journals, etc.

C) Timeline:

• Nominations will be received until 31 August 2018.
• The NC will review all candidacies and share their selections with the ISB Executive Committee by 14 September 2018.
• Candidates must be announced to the membership and on website (with letters of intent) by 28 September 2018
• Voting will take place online over the course of one week from 01-08 October 2018. (Further details about the voting process will be shared soon). Eleanor Williams will act as election officer.
• Only paying members with registration fees cleared on or before 28 September 2018 will be entitled and allowed to vote. If you pay your registration via bank transfer, please allow at least 2-3 working days for the payment to be processed.

The Nominating Committee is looking forward to receiving your applications!

The (Re)usable Data Project

On behalf of the International Society for Biocuration (ISB), we provide the following response to the Request for Information: NIH STRATEGIC PLAN FOR DATA SCIENCE, which describes NIH’s overarching goals, strategic objectives, and implementation tactics for modernizing the NIH-funded biomedical data-resource ecosystem.

We are a community highly involved in the development and maintenance of biological and biomedical databases, and the task of biocuration: the translation and integration of information relevant to biology into a database enabling the integration of the scientific literature as well as large data sets (distilling data into knowledge). The International Society for Biocuration (ISB) community includes, among others, biocurators, software developers, bioinformaticians, and standard developers. We are thus familiar with the pitfalls of current funding mechanisms for databases and recognize the importance of developing a different model which is what the strategic plan for data science intends to address. In this response, we focus exclusively on selected aspects of Goal 2: Promote Modernization of the Data-Resources Ecosystem, and Goal 4: Enhance Workforce Development for Biomedical Data Science.

Information requested:

* The appropriateness of the goals of the plan and of the strategies and implementation tactics proposed to achieve them:
Goal 2: Promote Modernization of the Data-Resources Ecosystem
Whilst overall the ISB is generally supportive of the statements made in this RFI, we feel that some terminology used needs to be improved. The RFI refers to databases and repositories indistictively. It should be noted that the term database is an overarching term, and we see the separation as being between primary data repositories, such as members of the INSDC (http://www.insdc.org/), with set submission criteria and minimal subsequent expert curation of the data (biocuration), and Knowledgebases [1]. Then both repositories and knowledgebases are types of databases. We suggest that the terms database, repositories and knowledgebase are clearly defined. Here are our proposed definitions and changes to the text:

A database is a computerized storehouse of data that provides a standardized way for locating, adding, removing, and changing data [2].

Data Repositories and Knowledgebases: What’s the Difference?
Data repositories and knowledgebases are both types of databases which store, organize, validate, and make accessible the core data related to a particular system or set of technologies. In the case of a data repository, the data is deposited by researchers following a set of guidelines and, other than ensuring the guidelines are adhered to, receives minimal subsequent input or modification.

Knowledgebases accumulate, organize, and link growing bodies of information related to the deposited data. A knowledgebase may contain information about gene models, transcript/protein expression patterns, splicing variants, localization, and protein-protein interaction and pathway networks related to an organism or set of organisms. Knowledgebases typically require significant semi-automated as well as manual biocuration by domain experts (e.g., literature-based gene ontology and phenotype annotations) beyond the quality assurance/quality control and annotation needed for data repositories.

We propose that the definition of biocuration is added to the glossary.

Biocuration is the extraction of knowledge from unstructured biological data (typically but not limited to publications) into a structured, computable form. Biocurators are typically Ph.D. level biologists, often with lab bench experience, coupled with
specialized expertise in computational knowledge representation. Their work entails the synthesis and integration of information from multiple sources, including, for example, peer-reviewed papers, large-scale projects, or conference abstracts. They contact authors directly for clarification, digest supplemental information, and resolve
identifiers, in order to accurately capture a researcher’s conclusion and their evidence for that conclusion. Biocurators strive to distill the current ‘best view’ from conflicting sources and ensure that their resources provide data that is not only
Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reproducible (FAIR), but also Traceable, appropriately Licensed, and inter-Connected (collectively, the FAIR-TLC principles) [3].

Goal 4-Enhance Workforce Development for Biomedical Data Science
Again, the ISB is in favor of this proposed goal as training different stakeholders in data science is key for the NIH to achieve the stewardship goals outlined in the NIH-wide strategic plan. However, the enhancement of the workforce is only discussed in terms of data-scientists, and we believe biocurators are relevant stakeholders as well.
In section 4.1 “In addition, NIH will recruit a cohort of data scientists and others with expertise in areas such as project management, systems engineering, and computer science from the private sector and academia for short-term (1- to 3-year) national service sabbaticals. These “NIH Data Fellows” will be embedded within a range of high-profile, transformative NIH projects such as All of Us, the Cancer MoonshotSM and the BRAIN initiative and will serve to provide innovation and expertise not readily available within the federal government.”
We think that biocurators would offer a unique perspective to these NIH projects given their training in formulating and using standards, in data analysis and integration, working with a variety of research communities for adoption of FAIR principles [3]. We suggest that biocurators are explicitly listed and considered as potential “NIH Data Fellows”.
One of the ISB goals is to train the next generation of biocurators, and have developed/collected training materials that could be used by NIH for training grant reviewers (https://www.biocuration.org/dissemination/biocuration-training-materials/).

* Opportunities for NIH to partner in achieving these goals:
NIH should establish a closer interaction with the International Society for Biocuration (ISB) to learn about biocuration and data science. ISB could collect/prepare training materials that could contribute to NIH training goals. ISB members could serve as NIH Data Fellows.
NIH should consult FAIRsharing (a catalogue of data preservation, management and sharing policies from international funding agencies, regulators and journals) and the BioDBcore guidelines [4-5], a community-defined, uniform, generic description of the core attributes of biological databases; ensuring consistency and interoperability between resources.
Encourage and provide guidance to R01 and R21 proposal writers to budget correctly for data sharing. Dumping data into a repository is not trivial, it takes time to deposit data with adequate information. There needs to be clear instructions to grant recipients to submit structured data to journals and/or databases. The biocuration community could help identify a few examples of how such structured data can be submitted. In addition, minimal common standards for databases are already described in BioDBcore guidelines, mentioned in the previous point.
There should be more emphasis on how NIH intramural researchers could collaborate with external groups to link resources. The plan discusses linking all NIH data resources in detail. However, there is a need to also link to external resources and vice-versa.

* Additional concepts that should be included in the plan:
We propose that the definitions of database and biocuration be added to the glossary.

* Performance measures and milestones that could be used to gauge the success of elements of the plan and inform course corrections:
Nothing to comment at this point

* Any other topic the respondent feels is relevant for NIH to consider in developing this strategic plan:

Sustained long-term funding for key resources. Whilst we appreciate that resources need to be constantly re-evaluated and shown to be keeping pace with the demands of new technologies and new use cases, constantly moving from one short-term grant to another, with no guarantee of renewed funding is not beneficial to the resource growth and the user community that relies on it.

References:
1. Gabella C, Durinx C, Appel R. Funding knowledgebases: Towards a sustainable funding model for the UniProt use case. F1000Res. 2017 Nov 27;6. Pii: ELIXIR-2051. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.12989.1. eCollection 2017. PubMed PMID: 29333230; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC5747334.

2. Mount D. Bioinformatics: Sequence and Genome Analysis, Second Edition (2004). Chapter 2. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

3. International Society for Biocuration. Biocuration: Distilling data into knowledge. PLOS Biology (2018) in press.

4. Gaudet P, Bairoch A, Field D, Sansone SA, Taylor C, Attwood TK, Bateman A, Blake JA, Bult CJ, Cherry JM, Chisholm RL, Cochrane G, Cook CE, Eppig JT, Galperin MY, Gentleman R, Goble CA, Gojobori T, Hancock JM, Howe DG, Imanishi T, Kelso J, Landsman D, Lewis SE, Karsch Mizrachi I, Orchard S, Ouellette BF, Ranganathan S, Richardson L, Rocca-Serra P, Schofield PN, Smedley D, Southan C, Tan TW, Tatusova T, Whetzel PL, White O, Yamasaki C; BioDBCore Working Group.Towards BioDBcore: a community-defined information specification for biological databases. Database (Oxford). (2011) baq027. doi:10.1093/database/baq027. Print 2011. PubMed PMID: 21205783; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3017395.

5. Gaudet P, Bairoch A, Field D, Sansone SA, Taylor C, Attwood TK, Bateman A, Blake JA, Bult CJ, Cherry JM, Chisholm RL, Cochrane G, Cook CE, Eppig JT, Galperin MY, Gentleman R, Goble CA, Gojobori T, Hancock JM, Howe DG, Imanishi T, Kelso J, Landsman D, Lewis SE, Mizrachi IK, Orchard S, Ouellette BF, Ranganathan S, Richardson L, Rocca-Serra P, Schofield PN, Smedley D, Southan C, Tan TW, Tatusova T, Whetzel PL, White O, Yamasaki C; BioDBCore Working Group. Towards BioDBcore: a community-defined information specification for biological databases. (2011) Nucleic Acids Res. 39(Database issue):D7-10. doi:10.1093/nar/gkq1173. Epub 2010 Nov 18. PubMed PMID: 21097465; PubMed CentralPMCID: PMC3013734.

Additional information requested:
Name: Cecilia Arighi, Nicole Vasilevsky and Sandra Orchard
Work Email: intsocbio@gmail.com
Name of Organization:International Society for Biocuration (ISB) (www.biocuration.org)

For members of advocacy groups or professional societies (optional): Please indicate your role and indicate whether you are responding on behalf of your organization.
Cecilia Arighi is the Chair of the Society, Nicole Vasilevsky is the Secretary and Sandra Orchard the Treasurer. This RFI is submitted on behalf of the ISB.

Sent April 01, 2018