As part of the Biocuration 2020 conference we had received excellent workshop proposals from several groups. Since the cancellation of the meeting we have been working with interested workshop organizers to bring this part of the conference online. We are excited to announce that we now have 3 workshops scheduled for the fall:

• September 24, 9am PT, 12pm ET, 5pm CET – Biocompute Objects: Methods for communicating provenance of data and analysis 
  • Organizers: Charles Hadley King, Raja Mazumder, Jonathon Keeney; George Washington University
  • Register here
  • Recording here
• October 29, 12pm PT, 3pm ET, 8pm CET – Gene Wiki: how to synchronize and curate primary sources with and in Wikidata 
  • Organizers: Andra Waagmeester, Lynn Schriml and Sabeh Ul-Hasan, Gene Wiki
  • Register here
  • Recording here
• Dec 04, 8am PT, 11am ET, 4pm UK, 5pm CET – Biolink Model – A community driven data model for life sciences
  • Organizers: Deepak Unni, Chris Mungall, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  • Register here
  • Recording here

All workshops will be free to all participants.

There is a Slack workspace set up to facilitate communication between organizers and participants. If you are interested in attending any of these workshops please email biocuration2020 @ gmail.com and we will send you an invite to the Slack workspace.

In response to recent events related to racism and injustice, most recently in the United States, but still present everywhere in the world, and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. The ISB is a society devoted to fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion in the scientific enterprise and in society as a whole. We unequivocally sustain and believe that Black Lives Matter.

Like all STEM organisations, we cannot ignore both the legacy of racism, especially in the life sciences, and the reality of discrimination in our institutions and workplaces. In the specific case of our membership, we are aware that discrimination is present in our field, and it is often reflected in a lack of recognition, defined career-tracks, or opportunties for advancement for people invested in biocuration.

What can we do? The ISB EDI committee was created in response to a necessary discussion about sexism, and we were aware from the start of the necessity of tackling other forms of discrimination and intersectionality. We must accelerate our current efforts, and go beyond them.

Current efforts:

• Our code of ethics and professional conduct directly addresses our commitment to inclusion and recognition of all community members and the expected behavior of ISB members (https://www.biocuration.org/isb-code-of-ethics-and-professional-conduct/)
• We have included an optional question on ethnicity in our membership and conference registration forms so we can assess the diversity of our community, and inform plans for how to attract and retain members from underrepresented groups
• We make available several funding opportunities for our members, the awarding of which aims to be free of bias, including:
  • The Biocuration Inclusivity Award provides individual ISB members with funding towards attending biocuration-relevant events (https://www.biocuration.org/the-biocuration-inclusivity-award/)
  • Microgrants – we offer funding to support regional meetings, encouraging those that relate to diversity and inclusion (https://www.biocuration.org/community/microgrants/)
  • Fellowships – the short-term fellowship fosters mutually beneficial collaborations across groups, encouraging participation from diverse geographical locations (https://www.biocuration.org/community/fellowships/)
  • Scholarships are now available for the Postgraduate Certificate in Biocuration run by the Institute of Continuing Education (ICE) at the University of Cambridge (https://www.biocuration.org/isb-scholarship-postgraduate-certificate-in-biocuration/).
  • Travel fellowships are available to support travel to the annual Biocuration Conference

New initiatives:

• We are currently working on inviting champions of equity, diversity, and inclusion from a variety of institutions to present webinars on the subject of EDI; to share with us more on how the subject is addressed at their institutions and to advise ISB members on what we can do to make a difference
• We will continue to review and revise, where necessary, our Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct to ensure that we represent the values and beliefs of all of our community

We welcome you to get in touch with any questions, concerns or suggestions. All members of our community are welcome to participate in the EDI Committee. Please email us at: intsocbio@gmail.com.

Thanks to those who were able to attend the Annual General Meeting on June 30, 2020.

For those who missed it, or want to review the materials, the slides and recording are available on the ISB conference page and below.

Slides – Annual General Meeting 2020 (google slides)

Recording – Annual Genera Meeting 2020 (.mp4 format)

You are invited to a virtual Annual General Meeting of the International Society for Biocuration on Tuesday, 30 June, 8am PST, 11am EST, 4:00 PM UK, 5pm western Europe.

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88975996534

This will take the form of a 30 minute presentation on the Society’s activities followed by a Q&A to the EC.

We look forward to seeing you there.

The ISB Executive Committee

---

Call in information below:

Topic: ISB AGM
Time: Jun 30, 2020 04:00 PM London

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88975996534
Meeting ID: 889 7599 6534

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Thanks to all who responded to the annual ISB survey, the results of the survey are available here. These results help us identify ways in which the ISB could better serve our community

Congratulations to our raffle winner Rachael Huntley, from SciBite who won a new iPad!

We are pleased to announce an exciting new scholarship opportunity! Scholarships are now available for the Postgraduate Certificate in Biocuration run by the Institute of Continuing Education (ICE) at the University of Cambridge. The course runs from September 23, 2020 to April 16, 2021.

The application deadline for the course is June 7, 2020. To apply, go to: https://www.ice.cam.ac.uk/course/postgraduate-certificate-biocuration

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, postgraduate programs in the academic year 2020-2021 will initially be delivered remotely with face-to-face teaching returning when the situation becomes viable.

The ISB will be awarding one scholarship for this course, to cover 2/3rds of the registration fees. The scholarship application form can be found here.

Eligibility Requirements:

To apply for the scholarship, one must be an active member of the ISB and be accepted into the course. We apologize for the late notice of this scholarship opportunity.

The deadline to apply for the scholarship is July 31st, 2020. 

In lieu of hosting a workshop at the Biocuration2020 conference, the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion subcommittee of the International Society for Biocuration will host a 30-minute webinar that will be open to the Biocuration community.

Title: Improving Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in Biocuration
When: Monday, 11th May
Time: 8.30-9.00am PT/4.30-5.00pm BST
Where: Zoom (details to be sent before the webinar – please register below)
Host: The EDI subcommittee of the ISB
Speakers: Nicole Vasilevsky (Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, Oregon, USA), Rachael Huntley (SciBite, Cambridge, UK), Moni Munoz-Torres (Oregon State University, Berkeley, CA, USA)

The webinar outline is as follows:

1. Introduction to the EDI subcommittee
2. Overview of work to date: the ISB conference Code of Conduct, recommendations for conference organizers & analysis of the ISB conference gender distributions over the past 10 years
3. Sli.do discussion/brainstorm for what our goals should be for the upcoming year.

Please register here.

We will email you the zoom link and a password the night before the webinar.

The webinar recording is available here.

It is our great pleasure to announce the recipient of the 2020 Biocuration Award:

Midori Harris from PomBase, University of Cambridge, UK was unanimously selected for the Biocuration Career Award.

Midori started her career in biocuration at Saccharomyces Genome Database as a curator and Gene Ontology (GO) developer. Her colleague, Val Wood, the PomBase project manager, attributes a large part of the success of GO to Midori’s insight, precision and clarity. Midori currently works for PomBase, which now benefits from her skills in both curation best practice, and in the development of the Fission Yeast Phenotype Ontology (FYPO). Midori is currently collaborating with EBI and Monarch Initiative to integrate FYPO into uPheno which will help to provide much needed generic phenotype terms for describing cell level phenotypes. She also now maintains the Fungal Anatomy Ontology FAO. All of these projects have far reaching benefits across many areas of biocuration and biology.

Thank you to the Award committee:

• Tiffany Callahan, Computational Biology PhD Candidate at University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, USA
• Violeta Ilik, Head Digital Collections and Preservation Systems at Columbia University in the City of New York, USA
• Varsha Khodiyar, Data Curation Manager at Springer Nature, UK
• Michael Livstone, Senior Scientific Data Curator at Bristol-Myers Squibb, USA
• Luana Licata, Scientific Database Curator at University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy
• Zhang Zhang, Professor at National Genomics Data Center, China

Congratulations to Midori!

From the Biocuration 2020 conference organizers:

After continuous monitoring of the evolving situation with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the Biocuration 2020 conference organizers in conjunction with the International Society for Biocuration made the decision to cancel the 2020 meeting that was scheduled to take place May 17-20 in Bar Harbor, Maine, USA.

Cancelling this meeting was a difficult decision made after careful thought and deliberation. This evidence-based decision was made after a thorough review of all factors impacting the conference, including the U.S. government’s enforcement of restrictions on international travelers to enter the U.S.; the imposition of travel restrictions issued by U.S. government agencies, cancer centers, academic institutions, and pharmaceutical and biotech companies; the directives of infectious disease experts and the World Health Organization (WHO). However, our primary concern was the health and safety of the attendees, the venue staff and the local community.

We recognize that the presentation of new data, exchange of information, and opportunities for collaboration offered by the chance to meet colleagues in this field are highly valued and we are investigating options for rescheduling this fall or for virtual presentations.

A great deal of work went into planning this meeting, and we wish to thank the members of the scientific committee, the organizing committee, the Jackson Laboratory Courses and Conferences office, the International Society for Biocuration, and the Harborside Hotel and Bar Harbor Club for their time and effort.

We will contact all registered attendees about the refund of registration and conference dinner fees, and we will also contact all sponsors about return of fees associated with contracts. All attendees should cancel their own hotel and travel reservations; please check the cancellation policy for your hotel, airline, etc. We have notified the hotels listed on the meeting website to expect cancellations.

Anyone with urgent and immediate concerns should email biocuration2020@gmail.com. Any additional updates concerning this meeting will be posted onto the meeting website and on social media.

The Biocuration 2020 conference organizers wish to sincerely thank everyone for their patience throughout this decision-making process.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is pleased to announce a two-day Curation at Scale Workshop to be held on April 27-28, 2020 on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. The NLM workshop featuring invited speakers will bring together biocurators, developers of automated curation methods, and other community stakeholders, and will offer a platform to learn, share and discuss opportunities and challenges in implementation of advanced computational techniques for scientific data curation. We invite participants from academia, government, publishers, and industry interested in the methods and tools employed in curation of biomedical data to attend this exciting workshop.

NLM Workshop on Curation at Scale

April 27-28, 2020

Wilson Hall, Building 1

NIH Main Campus

To find out more and register, please visit:

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/curationworkshop2020/index.html

Participants are encouraged to submit an abstract for consideration for poster presentation.

Poster abstract submission deadline: March 6, 2020

Registration deadline: April 17, 2020