Ruth Lovering- Recipient of the 2025 Exceptional Contribution to Biocuration Award

It is our great pleasure to announce the recipient of the 2025 Exceptional Contribution to Biocuration Award:
Ruth Lovering, University College London, UK

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The ISB congratulates Ruth Lovering, from University College London, UK, on receiving the 2025 Exceptional Contributions to Biocuration – Lifetime Achievement Award

Ruth has been an active member of the Biocuration community for over 25 years, significantly raising the profile of Biocuration and Bioinformatics as a Professor at University College London (UCL).

Ruth has contributed extensively to the curation of key resources such as HGNC, Gene Ontology (GO), and IMEx, and has been instrumental in developing curation standards, notably for pioneering the functional annotation of microRNAs and contributing to curation guidelines for transcription factors with the GREEKC Consortium.

Ruth established the Functional Gene Annotation Initiative in 2008, securing funding for cardiovascular, neurological, and microRNA annotation projects, and collaborating widely beyond her home department. Her work has led to numerous publications and real-world applications, and has included outreach to Parkinson’s patients and funders to highlight the value of curation.

Ruth was a prominent member of the GO Consortium, pushing forward standards and providing a significant proportion of human GO annotations. Ruth has organised and led multiple GO-annotation workshops for researchers alongside a popular UCL Bioinformatics MSc course. She is deeply committed to education and mentorship, supporting MSc students in gaining authorships, and actively encouraging curators to pursue career advancement, teaching qualifications, and publications.

Having served four years on the Executive Committee of the International Society for Biocuration, even after her recent retirement, Ruth continues to maintain UCL’s GO annotations, demonstrating her dedication to the Biocuration Community. Given her prolific contributions, leadership, mentorship, and ongoing commitment, Ruth Lovering is a highly deserving candidate for this award recognizing her lifetime achievements in Biocuration.

Congratulations Ruth!

Many thanks to the ISB members for voting!

ISB Award subcommittee:

  • Susan Bello
  • M. Victoria Nugnes
  • Sonia Balyan

Announcement for 2025 winners of “Excellence in Biocuration Awards”

We are pleased to announce winners of “Excellence in Biocuration Award” for the year 2025 in two categories:

Early Career Award –Tiago Lubiana, University of São Paulo, Brazil


The ISB congratulates Tiago Lubiana, from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, on receiving the 2025 Excellence in Biocuration Early Career Award.

Dr. Tiago Lubiana is a passionate and motivated scientist with interest in linked open data, ontologies, the semantic web, and their application in modeling cells and cell types. These interests lead him to be active in international and multi-disciplinary projects such as Wikidata, the OBO Foundry, the Bioregistry and and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Notably, made impactful contributions to the Cell Ontology and Complex Portal projects and gave one of the first demonstrations of extending an OBO Foundry ontology with multiple language labels to bolster its accessibility to non-english speakers.

Further than his scientific contributions, Tiago also has been an active community member within the International Society for Biocuration by participating on the EDI Committee and on the organization committee for the 2023 Annual International Biocuration Conference in Padua, Italy. He continues to be an advocate for open science, open data, and EDI in his daily activities in Brazil.

Advanced Career Award – Kimberly Van Auken, California Institute of Technology, USA


The ISB congratulates Kimberly Van Auken, from the California Institute of Technology, USA, on receiving the 2025 Excellence in Biocuration Advanced Career Award.

Kimberly Van Auken’s career reflects deep expertise, sustained innovation, and dedicated service to the biocuration community. With a foundation in C. elegans genetics and early experience in protein annotation, she has made impactful contributions to multiple high-profile projects, including WormBase, the Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium, and the Alliance of Genome Resources. Her pioneering efforts in applying text mining to GO curation, particularly through the use of Textpresso and participation in BioCreative challenges, exemplify her forward-thinking approach to improving curation efficiency and quality.

As co-manager of the GO annotation group, Kimberly helped lead the development of the Noctua curation tool and the creation of GO-Causal Activity Models (GO-CAMs), transforming how biological processes are modeled and curated. Her leadership in transitioning WormBase literature infrastructure to the Alliance and her current role as lead of the Literature Working Group underscore her ability to guide large-scale, collaborative initiatives. She is also a member of the Alliance AI working group and a core contributor to the AI-assisted ACKnowledge community curation platform, promoting broader engagement in data annotation.

In addition to her technical achievements, Kimberly is a dedicated mentor and educator who actively supports community curation and biocuration training. She is a dependable and proactive colleague, known for her thoughtful collaboration and forward-looking vision. Her contributions continue to shape the standards, tools, and community practices that support high-quality biocuration.

Congratulations Tiago and Kimberly!

Many thanks to the ISB members for voting!

ISB Award subcommittee:

  • Susan Bello
  • M. Victoria Nugnes
  • Sonia Balyan

Voting for 2025 Biocuration Career Awards Open

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

Nominations Open for 2025 Biocuration Awards

Nomination deadline extended until June 13

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.

Call for Proposals to host the 2027 International Biocuration Conference.

Dear Colleagues,

The Executive Committee of the International Society for Biocuration (ISB) is pleased to open the call to host the 20th International Biocuration Conference in Asia/Oceania, preferably during April or May 2027, though nearby dates may also be considered.

Individuals and organizations interested in applying may do so by sending a proposal to the ISB Executive Committee (intsocbio@gmail.com) on or before August 31st, 2025. 

The successful bidder will be notified by October 1st, 2025. The ISB Executive Committee will publicly announce the selected organization or individuals during the Annual General Meeting held virtually in October.

Format

Interested individuals or organizations are invited to submit their application via the following form:
Application to Host Biocuration Conference 2027

Applicants may later be asked to provide further details about the proposed venue, proposed dates, strategies for broad community engagement and fair gender representation, and more.

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

REGIONS ROTATION: 

  • North and South America
  • Europe and Africa
  • Asia and Oceania

For more information about the ISB and our previous conferences, please visit http://www.biocuration.org.

Your colleagues at the ISB Executive Committee.

Biocuration Community Survey 2025

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

Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility Officer

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:

  1. Acting as a point person for ISB members to communicate EDIA concerns.
  2. Reviewing applications for Biocuration conference organizers for any EDIA concerns.
  3. Working with the Biocuration conference liaison to ensure the annual conference is following EDIA guidelines.
  4. Acting as a point person to think ahead for any potential EDIA blindspots.

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!

Archived Data Sets

Last week saw a flurry of messages about how to find archived data sets. This is the list of resources and links from those messages. The bulk of this list came from the Data Rescue Project (@datarescue2025.bsky.social) that was shared by Melissa Haendel. Please check the Data Rescue Project page for new updates. The Data Rescue Project now has a homepage https://www.datarescueproject.org/about-data-rescue-project/

Larger and Established Data / Website Efforts

End of Term Crawl 

  • The main coordinated effort to archive websites
  • Datasets have been more of a challenge, especially data embedded in databases.

EDGI

Public Environmental Data Project 

Harvard’s LIbrary Innovation Lab Team

ICPSR

  • Overview of ICPSR’s data rescue activities to date:
    • Downloaded ~2800 files from various sources requested by researchers; all the files ICPSR collected will soon be available via a dropbox link.
    • Examining CDC data dump from archive.org to assess what might be missing.
      • Ideally will also be a resource for those looking for data to see what is/isn’t available.
    • ICPSR staff and allies are generating metadata for each of the datasets we have so that we can make them available through an existing archive at ICPSR (DataLumos, openICPSR, or the Resource Center for Minority Data, depending on our timeline and some technical issues we’re working out)
  • ICPSR Data Lumos – They have the older version of a lot of major data, including a recent addition from the CDC.

IPUMS

  • They have data and have been working on cataloging efforts
  • Notification went out yesterday that they will share more soon.

Dryad

  • Generalist repository available to help with data publication, storage, and preservation.

Synapse

  • Generalist biology and biomedical data repository available to help with data publication, storage, and preservation.

Silencing Science Tracker

  • Joint initiative of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund.
  • Tracks government attempts to restrict or prohibit scientific research, education or discussion, or the publication or use of scientific information.

OSF

  • Generalist repository for archiving, sharing, and storing all types of research outputs, not limited to preprints or only data.
  • OSF is available as an option for pre-prints of articles if, for some reason, they cannot be posted on official sources.
  • Many universities also have institutional repositories where research (articles, data, dissertations, etc) from that institution can be posted. They also have preservation mandates. An example is Penn’s ScholarlyCommons.

The Climate Mirror Project

  • Has NOAA data pulled during the 2017 data rescue.

Open Energy Data Initiative

  • A volunteer has pointed out that “key equity data” is missing from the Dept of Energy. Says they were able to find it on this site. Includes additional data from DOE.

Wayback Machine

Data Rescue Events

Smaller/Ad Hoc Rescue Efforts/ Data Archiving Activists

  • UCSB LSIT Data Mirroring
    • Mirrored and archived public data on locally hosted git server
    • Includes retrieved data sets from CDC, NIH, and NOAA
  • CDC Page on Internet Archive
    • A special archive created on IA of all CDC datasets publicly available as of January 28, 2025
    • uploaded by DataHoarders (we think)
  • Datasets in Dataverse
    • Data uploaded by the Climate Change and Health Research Coordinating Center (CAFE)
      • CAFE is looking for potentially non US based location to duplicate the contents of their collection
    • Includes CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index data.  
    • Most of what’s being placed here is data focusing on health and the environment.
    • DataRefuge from 2017 DataRefuge initiative can be opened for more deposits 
  • Safeguarding Research
    • Organizer is Henrik Schönemann; https://fedihum.org/@lavaeolus
    • There is a forum: https://safeguarding-research.discourse.group/ (admin = Henrik)
      • Based in EU, USA and global – got access to Update 1-2 PB (and more on the way) of storage & people willing to seed
      • Currently, we’ve got around 1TB of data backed up
        • Including >100.000 PDFs from academia.edu (“transgender”, “Queer Studies”, “intersex”, “nonbinary” etc. – see the forum for the full list)
        • 350GB web archive of CDC, including all 30.000 files from archive.cdc.gov And much more
        • “We’re working on providing a central index of archives, with metadata about who archived what, when, to be disseminated widely alongside torrent files and act as both a central point of coordination for archivers to assess what new work is needed, and a mass distribution channel.”
      • Possible contact to CERN, will update asap
  • Data Hoarder
    • A reddit community that is coordinating efforts to rescue data. 
  • Data Hoarding 
    • index of resources and archives related to data hoarding, web archival and self hosting. 
  • ArchiveTeam Warriors
    • They run a distributed crawler. Anyone can install it to help contribute.
    • US Federal Data page
    • Data is uploaded to Archive.org by volunteers
  • Data Liberation Project
    • Note: It looks like the project may have stalled in September 2024. Send info if you know more about them.
    • Run by BigLocalNews and MuckRock, which are good groups to follow.

Tools for Data Rescues

Library Guides to Data Rescues

Articles on current efforts

Articles for context

Existing Alternative Data Sources

Thanks to Brianne Dosch for suggesting the section and some of the bullets.

  • PolicyMap – offers a free tier that can be used to view basic information down to the tract-level, but more detailed data and functionality requires a subscription; available at some universities
  • FRED – They have some demographic data as well; free and open source
  • Census Reporter – is a free, open-source platform focused on making American Community Survey (ACS) data more accessible, including the recent upload of the 2022 1-Year ACS data
  • Esri – for mapping users, the GIS vendor publishes several U.S. Census Bureau data sets, including the ACS, through its ArcGIS Online Platform
  • IPUMS – Even when the government operates normally, many analysts turn to Minnesota Population Center products to access ACS, Current Population Survey microdata and Decennial Census data
  • Social Explorer – historical Census data and more; available at some universities
  • SimplyAnalytics – has internally processed American Community Surveys; available at some universities
  • American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists – Hosting copies of immunization schedules and contraceptive use guidance from the CDC
  • https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/home – The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) provides a comprehensive record of the world’s nucleotide sequencing information, covering raw sequencing data, sequence assembly information and functional annotation. Mirrors SRA public data

Economic Indicators 

  • National League of Cities: Federal Grant Navigation Equity Dashboard 
    • This tool aggregated data from many sources – it seems to still be able to categorize disadvantaged communities (by environmental and economic standards), as well as other critical data denotations that are increasingly hard to access 
  • ALICE Economic Vitality Dashboard and Report (2022 w/ 2024 update)
    • This resource specifically provides data on work, housing, and community resources for households below the ALICE threshold (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed). The data is provided by the U.S. Census Bureau’s Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS, 202!) 
  • National Equity Atlas Dashboards
    • A data and policy tool that provides a detailed report card on racial and economic equity – this tool can provide a holistic Racial Equity Index snapchat of communities. The Atlas draws its data from a unique regional equity indicators database developed and maintained by two private institutions: PolicyLink and USC Equity Research Institute ERI.

Public Health 

  • County Health Rankings & Roadmaps (CHR&R)
    • A program of University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute, this data tool aims to highlight the symbiotic nature of health and equity by factoring in physical environment, social and economic indicators, clinical care, and health behaviors to health outcomes. 
      • They also recommend these additional health data platforms: 
  • City Health Dashboard
    • From NYU Langone Health, this platform provides 40+ measures of health and factors affecting health across five areas (Health Behaviors, Social and Economic Factors, Physical Environment, Health Outcomes, and Clinical Care) for 970+ cities across the U.S.

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