Thanks to all who attended this year’s Annual General Meeting. Congratulations again to our Early and Advance Career Award Winners, Tiago Lubiana and Kimberly Van Auken! You can find their excellent talks at around the half way point of the recording of the meeting.
The meeting recording is up on the ISB YouTube channel if you missed the meeting.
We had five outstanding candidates:
Out of 176 eligible voters, we had 80 ballots returned. The vote totals for each candidate were:
The three candidates with the most votes all accepted the positions on the EC.
Thank you to all the candidates for agreeing to run. Thank you to all who voted. We look forward to a productive year.
The International Society for Biocuration (ISB) is offering 5 in-person travel grants for the Biocuration 2026 Conference in Cape Town, South Africa.
In-person awards cover up to 2,700 CHF in expenses, paid as reimbursements following the conference, meaning that awardees must pay their expenses and send receipts (including any for currency exchange costs) to the ISB following the conference.
In person awardees are also required to submit a recent photograph and a written report (minimum 100 words) about the outcomes of their attendance. These will be posted on the ISB website, newsletter, ISB mailing list, and promoted on social media (Bluesky, LinkedIn, Mastodon).
All awardees are expected to present either a talk or poster at the conference.
If you are a current ISB member, please provide the email address associated with your ISB membership.
Deadline for applications: October 31st, 2025
The International Society for Biocuration (ISB) will hold its Annual General Meeting (AGM) on Monday, October 27th, 2025 along with presentations by our two biocurator career award winners, Tiago Lubiana and Kimberly Van Auken.
Time: 4:00–6:00 pm CST / 3:00–5:00 pm GMT / 11:00 am–1:00 pm EDT / 8:00 am–10:00 am PDT
Note that daylight savings begins in Europe/UK on October 26th and daylight savings begins on November 2nd in the USA, so there’s a slightly different offset than usual. All canonical times for this event are based on European time!
Please fill out this form to register to attend by Sunday, October 26th, 2025 and receive the meeting link.
This meeting will be recorded, by attending the meeting you are agreeing to be recorded. The recording will be available on the ISB website after the meeting.
Schedule (in CET):
Register here You do not need to be an active ISB member to attend
Voting will be open from June 25th – July 23rd, 2025
This year ISB is awarding Early, Advanced, and Lifetime Achievement Biocuration Awards. All active ISB members may vote for the nominees. Active members should receive an email with their individual ballot link. The email will be sent to the address associated with your ISB account. If you become a member during the voting period, please reach out to us to receive a ballot.
Nominees for Excellence in Biocuration Early Career Award 2025
Nominees for Excellence in Biocuration Advanced Career Award 2025
Nominees for Exceptional Contributions to Biocuration – Lifetime Achievement Award 2025
The ISB is calling for nominations for three Excellence in Biocuration awards in 2025 through the end of May:
1. Early Career Award (https://forms.gle/pGABYnqSqPgiDsVe9)
2. Advanced Career Award (https://forms.gle/Tyfa25BcrM8ejDsC9)
3. Exceptional Contribution to Biocuration (i.e., lifetime award; https://forms.gle/3E2b85eSteaoXzSA6)
Self nominations are welcome! See previous awards on our site: https://www.biocuration.org/community/biocuration-career-awards.
This survey aims to gather and analyze information about the field of biocuration.
This survey is being conducted by the International Society for Biocuration (ISB) to identify potential gaps or inequities among biocurators and to identify areas where the ISB may be able to take actions to improve awareness of biocuration.
This is a follow-up with our community to assess the progress made since the we began surveying the community in 2017. The results from past surveys are available here: https://www.biocuration.org/dissemination/survey-results/ (see ISB Career Description Survey Results).
The resulting data will be aggregated and analyzed and shared with the community. No identifying information will be revealed in reporting results of this survey.
Thank you for your participation. The survey will close Friday, March 28th, 2025
Do you have examples of publications or preprints describing scientific advances made using curated data from your resource? Let ISB know and we will promote these on our social media platforms. We want to make sure the hard work of curators does not go unnoticed.
Use this form to submit your examples and we will post to the ISB social media platforms.
EMBL-EBI has an ongoing series of webinars on the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in bioinformatics. The series runs from Feb. 26 – Apr. 2, 2025. Sign ups and recordings of past webinars on the EMBL-EBI site.
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/training/events/large-language-models-and-their-applications-bioinformatics/
The International Society for Biocuration (ISB) is committed to working to build an inclusive and diverse network of biocurators, ontologists, data stewards and others who work to improve the quality of data wherever they may work. The EDI subcommittee has worked hard to establish a set of guidelines to promote equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility for the society. With these guidelines in place and with the difficulty in maintaining an active committee in the past year the executive committee has decided to establish an Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility Officer.
This officer will be charged with:
The past few years have seen the first Biocuration conference in India (2024), the first fully hybrid Biocuration conference (2025), and plans for the first Biocuration conference in Africa (2026). We fund travel fellowships to enable curators from low-income countries to attend Biocuration conferences, We have increased the number of available microgrants and inclusivity grants available to members this year to two of each type. We have also revised and updated our guidelines for conference organizers.
We thank Mary Ann Tuli and the members of the EDI committee for their tireless work over the years to guide the society policies to where they are now.
We thank Luana Licata for volunteering to be the inaugural EDIA Officer!
