Micro-grant awarded to: Dr. Pankaj Jaiswal
Affiliation: Oregon State University
Website: http://icbo.cgrb.oregonstate.edu

Dr. Jaiswal (ICBO 2016 Conference Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology in the College of Agricultural Sciences (CAS) at Oregon State University), hosted the 2016 joint meeting of the BioCreative and the 7th International Conference on Biological Ontologies (a special focus event in the annual ICBO series).  The theme of the joint meeting was Food, Nutrition, Health and Environment for the 9 billion. The Program Chairs, Dr. Robert Hoendorf from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia and Dr. Cecilia Arighi from the University of Delaware, United States, together with program committee members did an excellent job of putting together the conference agenda.

Biology, bioinformatics, and biomedical research have seen a deluge of data in recent times from digital record keeping, samples, methods, observations, imaging, sensors, genotyping, phylogenomics, phenotyping and -omics studies.  While the generation of Big-Data is already successfully driving scientific research, providing the needed metadata (data annotating the BIG-data) is still a major challenge in the life sciences areas. For example, life scientists in all spheres are mining BIG-data either to make novel discoveries or to confirm existing results. However, our ability to draw the inferences needed for discovery depends on the quality of the reference and sample annotations (metadata descriptions) of data derived from assays of genotypes, molecular functions, phenotypes, pathotypes, environments, and treatments. Ontologies, a refined set of well-defined and structured controlled vocabularies, provide consistency and quality in metadata annotation. As the role of ontologies expands, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and data mining methods are being used increasingly for information extraction into the more structured and meaningful forms allowed by ontologies.

More than 160 participants (35% women) from 14 countries and ~90 cities attended this international conference, which provided a platform for fostering discussion, exchange, and innovation in research and development in the areas of biomedical ontology (including plants, agriculture, environment, and biomes, as well as human health and disease). Researchers and professionals from all spheres of biology, medicine, ecology, computer science, mathematics, text-mining, BIG-data analytics and related fields were invited to share their knowledge and experience.

At the meeting, more than 90 plenary talks and 11 software demonstrations were presented in 10 plenary sessions and 14 workshops. There were also 4 keynote talks, 2 invited talks and 39 poster presentations.  With generous support from our sponsors, including the International Society for Biocuration, we offered free registration to 35 individuals representing students, postdocs, minorities in the sciences, and early career researchers. The 2016 ICBO-BioCreative Conference Proceedings were published online and are freely accessible.

The conference concluded with a vote of thanks and the announcement for ICBO 2017 to be held at Newcastle University, UK.

The International Biocuration Conference is a unique event for biocurators and developers of biological databases to discuss their work, promote collaborations, and foster a sense of community in this very active and growing area of research. For the 10th International Biocuration Conference in Palo Alto, California, you are invited to submit your work for publication. This call for papers is done in collaboration between DATABASE: The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation and the International Society for Biocuration.

The DATABASE journal will publish an online Virtual Issue of the accepted papers, see below for a link to last year’s issue. This is a great occasion to enhance the recognition of your work and of our profession by the greater biological research communities. The Biocuration 2017 program committee will prioritize inclusion of accepted papers for oral presentations at the conference.

This year manuscripts are invited for the following topic areas:

• Functional Annotation
• Phenotypes, genotypes, and variants
• Clinical annotations, diseases, drugs
• Big data to knowledge
• Large scale and predictive annotation
• Data standards and ontologies
• Crowd/community curation
• Data integration, data visualization
• Curation standards and best practice; inference from evidence; data and annotation quality
• Biocuration and the scholarly communication cycle; data publishing and curation, data sharing

Papers on topics outside the above will also be considered for publication.

The manuscript review process will be expedited by the journal’s associated editors and they will thus need to be firm on the submission deadlines:

Submission deadline: October 31, 2016
First decisions: December 9, 2016
Deadline for revisions: January 23, 2017
Final decisions: February 25, 2017
Conference: March 26-29, 2017

Authors wishing to submit to DATABASE for the 2017 Biocuration Virtual issue should go to the DATABASE home page  and click on “Submit now” after having read the “Instructions to Authors”. Authors should CLEARLY state that they are submitting the manuscript for consideration for the Biocuration 2017 conference so that the DATABASE staff will ensure appropriate fast-track for inclusion in this meeting’s proceedings. In addition, within the database submission form, you should also select “Biocuration Conference Paper” as a manuscript type. We look forward to your participation at Biocuration 2017 the 10th International Biocuration Conference.

Submitting a paper to DATABASE does not in itself sign you up to give a talk or poster; you must register your interest separately. Information about abstract submission will be announced soon.

The proceedings of the past International Biocuration Conference, the Biocuration Virtual Issue can be found online at http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/databa/biocuration_virtual_issue.html

Kind regards,

Biocuration 2017 Organizing Committee
biocuration2017@lists.stanford.edu

The 2016 election of the ISB Executive Committee (EC) will be held in September.

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.

This year, there are two (2) open positions, as the terms of Claire O’Donovan and Mike Cherry come to completion.

We encourage nominations from diverse geographical regions, disciplines, and career level/position. We aim to have the ISB executive committee be representative of our membership. Anyone is encouraged to self-nominate or nominate another. The Nominating committee will be taking diversity into account when they make their recommendations.

2016 Electoral Process

A) The Nominating Committee:

The Nominating Committee (NC) was 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 2016 Nominating Committee are:

• Kimberly Van Auken
• Frederic Bastian
• Doug Howe
• Ruth Lovering
• Jingchu Luo

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 via email. 
2. Submit a ‘Statement of Intent’ where you outline your motivations to join the EC and your intended contributions to the group; also include a brief biographical sketch.
3. Complete a ‘Conflict of Interests’ statement describing any activities, memberships of other associations, editorial positions on journals, etc.

C) Timeline:

• Completed nominations will be received until 7 September, 2016.
• The NC will review all candidacies and share their selections with the ISB membership on 14 September, 2016.
• Voting will take place online over the course of one week on 21 – 28 September, 2016. (Further details about the voting process will be shared soon).
• Only paying members with registration fees cleared on or before 19 September, 2016 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 Executive Committee of the International Society for Biocuration would like to once again invite tenders to host the 11th International Biocuration Conference during the Northern Spring or Summer of 2018.

Individuals and organizations interested in applying may do so by sending a proposal to the ISB Executive Committee on or before 9 September 2016. 

We would very much appreciate an email indicating early intentions to bid. 

The successful bidder will be notified by 7 October 2016. The ISB Executive Committee will publicly announce the selected organization or individuals during the 10th International Biocuration Conference, to be held in Stanford, California in March, 2017.

Format:  Proposals should be short; length should not exceed one side of an A4 or US letter size sheet, using 11 point font.

The proposal should contain:

• The name and institution of the local organizer
• Details of the proposed venue for up to 350 participants
• The range of dates available for the conference
• A brief outline of a strategic plan to attract a broad range of participants from the Biocuration community
• As fair gender representation is positively encouraged by the ISB; we would also like to know how the applicant intends to promote this.

In a continued effort to bring our meeting to curators in all geographic regions, we strongly encourage ISB members in Asia and Australasia to put forward proposals to bring the ISB meeting to your region once again, or for the first time!

More information about the ISB and our previous conferences, can be found on this website. Start at http://www.biocuration.org

We look forward to hearing from you!

ISB Micro-grant awarded to: Dr. Melissa Haendel  & Dr. Nicole Vasilevsky.
Affiliation: Oregon Health & Science University Library

The 2016 Future of Research Communication and e-Scholarship conference (FORCE2016, https://www.force11.org/meetings/force2016) was held from April 17-19 in Portland, Oregon. The conference aimed to host a trans-disciplinary summit and lively discussion around opportunities, challenges, and progress in advancing research scholarship through new technologies and practices. Force11 aims to bring about a positive change in scholarly communications through both the effective use of information technology and a deeper understanding of the nature of evolving scholarly practice.

The FORCE2106 conference included a variety of session formats including workshops, keynote talks, presentations and panel discussions, a hack-a-thon, demos, and poster sessions. The audience included a diverse group of participants including researchers across various disciplines, biocurators from Model Organism Databases and other databases, librarians, publishers, technologists, information scientists, funders, and administrators from academic and private institutions around the world. The keynote talks include speakers from Harvard, Indiana University at Bloomington, the Alan Alda Institute, and the US National Institutes of Health.

Highlights from FORCE2016:

• “Innovations in Curation” workshop, a white paper is expected soon. Workshop chairs: Matthew Brush, Allen Dearry, Emma Ganley, Susan Gregurick, and Melissa Haendel.
• Putting the Force11 FAIR principles into practice: a community curation of SHARE, which focused on searching various online data repositories. Workshop chairs: Erin Braswell, Cynthia Hudson-Vitale, Judy Ruttenberg and Jeff Spies.
• The “Data by the people, for the people” session focused on patient and citizen lead biocuration efforts, many of which are hoping to leverage expert curation process design based upon professional curator expertise. Session chairs: Catherine Brownstein and Rose Relevo.

The funds from this micro grant were used to sponsor the FORCE2016 conference by way of a best poster/demo award. The awards went to:

• Centralizing content and distributing labor: a community model for curating the very long tail of microbial genomes. Authors: Timothy Putman, Sebastian Burgstaller-Muehlbacher, Andra Waagmeester, Chunlei Wu, Andrew I. Su, Benjamin M. Good.
• Too big to share? Scaling up knowledge transfer workflows from little science to big science. Authors: Bernadette M. Randles, Ashley E. Sands, Christine L. Borgman.
• Think global, act local: innovating nationally with the Italian ORCID hub. Authors: Michele Mennielli, Andrea Bollini, Josh Brown.

Slides from the conference are available in the FORCE2016 FigShare collection at https://force16.figshare.com/

The video archives will be soon available on the FORCE2016 website.

Learn more about ISB Micro-Grants and how to apply at http://biocuration.org/community/microgrants/

ISB is now ready to distribute your messages to the biocuration community through the new mailing list.

To subscribe to the list and receive instructions for use, please send a blank message to this address. ISB moderators will process your request as promptly as possible.

When messaging biocurators via the ISB Mailing List, please consider:

ISB Mailing List User Agreement: The ISB is a non profit organisation for biocurators, developers, and researchers with an interest in biocuration. The society promotes the field of biocuration and provides a forum for information exchange on the topics of interest to its members. The ISB will do its best to only distribute information deemed pertinent to the field of biocuration, and it reserves the right to prevent posting to this mailing list in the event of use of inflammatory and/or abusive language, unwelcome advertisement, and in other events when appropriate. The ISB Mailing List is moderated by members of the ISB Executive Committee.

Please contact ISB Executive Committee with comments and questions.

It is our great pleasure to announce the recipient of the Inaugural Biocuration Career Award – 2016

In April of 2016 the International Society for Biocuration awarded its inaugural Career Award to Dr. John Westbrook.

John works at the Research Collaboratory for Structural
Bioinformatics Protein Databank (RCSB PDB), where his work over the past 20+ years has helped launch the field of biocuration.

He designed the PDBx/mmCIF data representation for biological macromolecular data used by PDB for data submission (now having 117K structures), which is utilized by a variety of software applications to validate a PDB submissions and analyze PDB data. John keeps the model and related tools up to date with new definitions and modeling based in new technologies, which provisions for community buy-in and participation. Searching for “protein data bank” OR “protein databank” in Pubmed gives 2988 publications. PDB is used by Pharma and biotech companies.

John’s data modeling of protein structures and his development of a variety of software tools has been pivotal to make these data maximally useful to a very large and diverse community. Representation of molecular complexity of macromolecular structure, experimental methodologies, and biological context has enabled John to facilitate integration with a spectrum of biomedical resources.

Our most sincere congratulations to John!

Best regards,

Your colleagues at the ISB Executive Committee, and the 2016
Biocuration Awards Committee

The 2016 Biocuration Awards Committee are:
Melissa Haendel – Chair
Emma Ganley 
Takashi Gojobori
David Landsman
Michele Magrane
Kimberly Van Auken
Alfonso Valencia

Please join us in drafting a white paper on behalf of the International Society for Biocuration.

This document was first presented as a draft to the community during the  Workshop on Curation Innovation at the 9th International Biocuration Conference in Geneva, Switzerland.

Your suggestions and contributions can be added on the shared document available online as a Google Document at http://tinyurl.com/ISB2016-WS2-whitepaper