2016 ISB Executive Committee Election

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!

Call for Proposals: 11th International Biocuration Conference

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!

FORCE2016 Micro-grant Report

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:

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/

New ISB Mailing List

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.

Recipient of the Inaugural Biocuration Career Award 2016

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

 

Dr. John Westbrook
Dr. John Westbrook

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

ISB White Paper

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

Announcing 2016 ISB Travel Fellowships Awardees

Congratulations are in order!

Please join us as we extend our best wishes to the winners of the 2016 ISB Travel Fellowships to attend the
9th International Biocuration Conference to be held in
Geneva, Switzerland on April 10-14.

This year’s ISB Travel Fellowships were awarded to:

Alba Gutierrez
Alex Vesztrocy
Francesco Russo
Hayda Almeida
Hayley Dingerdissen
Jean-Philippe Gourdine
Jinmeng Jia
Qingyu Chen
Timothy Putman

Congratulations again, and see you in Geneva!

Our sincere thanks to the 2016 ISB Travel Fellowships Committee:
Cecilia Airghi, Pascale Gaudet, and Sandra Orchard.

2016 Biocuration Career Award

The International Society for Biocuration
is proud to announce the first
Biocuration Career Award.

 

The Biocuration Career Award recognizes biocurators in non-leadership positions who have made sustained contributions to the field of biocuration.

The nominations will be reviewed by the newly formed ISB Award Committee, comprised of one member of the ISB’s Executive Committee (ISB-EC) and six (6) additional members from the wider research community; these members were nominated by the ISB-EC based on diversity in area of expertise, organization type, role, and geographic location.

Who can nominate and/or be nominated?

  • Any currently active ISB member may nominate anyone in the field of biocuration, whether the potential nominee is a member of ISB or not.
  • Members of the ISB can make no more than 1 nomination per year.
  • Those who hold Principal Investigator or Group Leader positions, or who are current members of the ISB Executive Committee or the ISB Award Committee, are not be eligible for this award.
  • Self-nominations will not be considered.

How to submit your nomination:

  • Nominations should be sent via email to the award committee at intsocbio [at] gmail.com with the subject line “Biocuration Career Award Nominations“.
  • The nomination email should contain the following fields:
    • Nominator details (name, e-mail and affiliation, member of ISB);
    • Nominee details (name, e-mail and affiliation);
    • Short list of scholarly contributions (a maximum of 50 words);
    • Brief description of why you are recommending this person (a maximum of 350 words).

The recipient of the award will be invited to give a presentation at the following International Biocuration Conference, with all expenses paid by the ISB.

Important Dates for 2016

Deadline to submit nominations: Sunday 20-March-2016
Award Announcement: April, 2016 at the 9th International Biocuration Conference


 

Sincerely,

The 2016 ISB Award Committee.

 

The 2016 “Biocuration Career” Award Committee are:
Melissa Haendel (Chair)
Emma Ganley
Takashi Gojobori
David Landsman
Michele Magrane
Kimberly Van Auken
Alfonso Valencia

2013/2014 ISB Executive Committee

The term of the 2013/2014 ISB Executive Committee (EC) starts on November 1st, 2013. We are delighted to welcome Melissa Haendel and Jennifer Harrow to the ISB EC, joining Teresa Attwood, Alex Bateman, J. Michael Cherry, Pascale Gaudet, Monica Munoz-Torres, Claire O’Donovan, and Marc Robinson-Rechavi. We are grateful to Renate Kania and Chisato Yamasaki for having served on the committee since 2011.

DORA

The ISB signs the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), initiated by the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) together with a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals, that aims to improve the ways in which the outputs of scientific research are evaluated.

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