Annual Report to the Membership 2019/2020

ISB Executive Committee

Goals of the ISB

• Define and promote the work of biocurators

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• Foster connections with user communities to ensure that databases and accompanying tools meet specific user needs

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• Promote communication and exchanges between curators: meetings, workshops, training

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• Encourage best practices by providing documentation on standards and annotation procedures�

Why become an ISB member?

1. Leadership, Recognition, Awards, Funding

• Opportunities to lead and influence the field with your vision
• ISB Awards - Career, Exceptional Contributions
• Travel Fellowships to attend ISB meetings
• Exchange Fellowships to perform collaborative work
• Microgrants to sponsor local and regional short meetings of ISB members
• Publication costs discount (20%) with DATABASE (journal of ISB)

Why become an ISB member?

2. Connecting to the Scientific Community

• Connect with training opportunities (e.g. Goblet, Carpentries, etc.)
• Collaboration potential: team science increasingly needs biocuration and related tools; grant proposals.
• Mailing List to 750 individuals (free of cost)
• Job Postings (free of cost)

Why become an ISB member?

3. Our collective voice promotes, represents, and advocates for you and for science in general:

• Strong data sharing and interoperability standards, guidance on evaluation of public data sources and databases, Open Science
• Develop responses to funding agencies requests of information
• Publications to promote biocuration

ISB Executive Committee 2019-2020

Andrew Su, US

Rama Balakrishnan, US

Frederic Bastian, Switzerland

Jane Lomax, UK

Mary Ann Tuli, Hong Kong

Randi Vita US

Ruth Lovering, UK

Working groups

Outreach Training and Communication

IT infrastructure

Conference coordination

Fellowships and Awards

Microgrants and Fellowships

Equality, Diversity & Inclusion

Elections

Mary Ann, Nicole, Sandra, Jane, Randi, Ruth

Nicole, Frederic, Ruth, Rama,

Rama, Sandra, Nicole, Jane

Frederic, Ruth, Rama, and external committee members

All Executive Committee members

Nicole, Mary Ann

External committee members

Working group

Members

Conferences 2019/2020

• A highly successful meeting in Cambridge – our thanks to all who attended and contributed
• Biocuration 2020 was planned to be in Bar Harbor, US – cancelled due to COVID-19
• Our thanks to Sue, Cindy and the team for all their efforts, we hope to be back with you soon.

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• Biocuration 2021 will be in New Dehli, India – date to be announced when we are confident travel restrictions are being lifted globally

Biocuration Career Award

Recognizes biocurators in non-leadership positions who have made sustained contributions to the field of biocuration

https://www.biocuration.org/community/biocuration-career-awards/

Fellowships and awards

2020 Biocuration Career Awardee

Fellowships and awards

Dr. Midori Harris

Scientific Curator, PomBase, U. Cambridge

Award will be made in 2021

With thanks to the

2020 ISB Award Committee

Fellowships and awards

• Frederic Bastian | SIB/ISB EC
• Tiffany Callahan | University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
• Violeta Ilik | Columbia University,US
• Varsha Khodiyar | Springer Nature, UK
• Michael Livstone | Bristol-Myers Squibb, USA
• Luana Licata | U. Rome, Italy
• Zhang Zhang | National Genomics Data Center, China

Travel Fellowship

• Cost of travel & accommodation for ISB meeting up to an advertised maximum amount
• Normally 5-10 awarded annually
• None in 2020 due to COVID

Microgrants

Available, up to 500CHF, to fund local meetings relevant to Biocuration

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2019-20 Awardees:

Simone Panni HUPO-PSI (not claimed – COVID, carry forward to 2021?)

https://www.biocuration.org/community/microgrants/

Fellowships and awards

Exchange Fellowships

Fellowships and awards

www.biocuration.org/community/fellowships/

• Promote collaborations and exchanges between groups working in the field of biocuration.
• Covers travel and accommodation expenses during the exchange with a total up to CHF 2,000.

Randi Vita:

Exchange to EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, UK

28-31st May 2019

New grant - Inclusivity Award

• Designed to help people to travel to/attend conferences who otherwise could not
• Help with child-care, mobility, accessibility, enhanced hearing/visibility needs
• Award will be decided upon by EC and awardee not publicly announced

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One award made up to May 2020, not claimed due to COVID

Financial report

Income

    Membership fee CHF 8294

   Income from Cambridge conference CHF 29,000

Expenditure   

ISB travel awards        CHF 1,000

Exchange fellowship    CHF 2,000

GOBLET membership    CHF 280

Total CHF 3,280 (10,692 last year)

�Balance            CHF 119,796

We need a vote…

To change the constitution, we need a vote at the AGM.

To enable signature verification on change of Chair/Treasurer we need to change the names of these post-holders-currently this is embedded within the Constitution and can only be changed by a vote.

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The EC propose moving the names of all current post-holders from the body of the constitution to the appendix so that these can be changed when needed without a formal vote by the membership

Please remember, only paid-up members can vote.

Please vote by unmuting your microphone

1. Unmute now if you agree with the proposal (mute if you disagree or wish to abstain)
2. Unmute now if you disagree with the proposal (mute if you agree or wish to abstain)
3. Unmute now if you wish to abstain

Website: biocuration.org

Website

Communication

• Minutes of EC meetings – on website
• Overview of monthly activities – sent to mailing list
• Quarterly newsletter – sent to mailing list and on website
• Active twitter feed @biocurator
• LinkedIn group

Advocacy

2020 Survey Results

We want to know your opinion about ISB

https://www.biocuration.org/dissemination/survey-results/

Are you a member of the International Society for Biocuration (ISB)?

Total # of responders

102 total

What were your motivations for joining ISB?

Networking

Reduced conference fees

Stay up to date with biocuration topics

Community involvement

Reduced Database publication fee

Top 5 responses:

Takeaways:

Biocurators like to interact

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How could the ISB better facilitate networking and sharing information to keep everyone informed?

Outreach: Most popular social media platforms

Follow us on LinkedIn

Twitter: @biocurator

Non-members: �Is the price of membership an obstacle for joining?

Takeaways:

The price is not a barrier for most non-members.

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We have recently added new pricing options:

• Low & lower-middle income countries
• Companies with <250 employees

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Other suggestions to reduce the barriers?

Have you ever attended an ISB conference?

Members

Non-members

Takeaways: How could we make the conference more assessible to the community?

• Funding
• Childcare
• Virtual sessions

Health considerations

https://www.biocuration.org/wellness/

How many minutes of moderate intensity physical activity a week do you think the World Health Organization recommends that adults undertake?�

Training needs

Learning specific curation tools

Using Git/GitHub

Programming in Python

Programming in R

Project Management

Educational topics of interest:

Webinar

In person training in your region

Self-paced online learning

In person training at ISB conference

Biocuration courses at Force11 FSCI

Preferred delivery format

Takeaways:

• We have resources available online in Goblet/Tess but 89% of respondents have not used them
• 38% of respondents said they may be interested in teaching these topics to the community

Suggestions for improvement�(free text responses)

Conference

Outreach & Communication

Give more time to presentations from junior or new members of the community

Interact with even more societies/consortia/bodies

Co-organise events at their conferences

Generally better communication:

• improved website
• keep the newsletter but make it a blog on the website
• better outreach on the need for and benefits of curation

What is the ISB planning / what are the future directions and plans, its' big ideas.

A mechanism to post those ideas and discuss with members at large.

Broader breadth of topics

Add regular sections to newsletter about tools, strategies to organize/improve/automate curation etc.

Suggestions for improvement�(free text responses)

Equality, diversity and inclusion

Conference venues that have parking

Recruit more diversity (age, in industry, geographic, etc)

More numbers in Asian countries

Reach out to curator groups in under-represented parts of the world, e.g. Africa, South America

Training/Activities

Hackathons and annot-a-thons

Provide webinars for members with professional development opportunities/education on biocuration tools and topics/curation tips

Set up some simple suggestions/MOOC for new curators

Satisfaction with ISB

Raffle winner!

Rachael Huntley,

SciBite

The ISB Executive Committee would like to thank members of the society that have volunteered over the years

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We welcome more!

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Volunteering

Call for volunteers

• Website development and maintenance (EC liaison: Nicole)
• Maintain and improve Wordpress site running biocuration.org
• Optimize membership signup / renewal / reporting system
• Newsletter creation (EC liaison: Mary Ann)
• Solicit and/or write content
• Formatting / layout
• Social media (EC liaison: Jane)
• Contribute to society’s presence on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
• Award committees (EC liaison: Frederic)
• Contribute to select impactful exchange fellowships
• Contribute to select relevant candidates for the ISB elections
• Contribute to select ISB awardees

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Volunteering

Call for Submission of Biocuration Training Materials

• The ISB is collaborating with GOBLET and TeSS to aggregate training materials related to biocuration
• We encourage you to become part of the pool of educators who are sharing the material
• Create a profile on Elixir and associate it with ISB
• Share biocuration training materials on Elixir Tess
• Send your training materials to us and we will add them to Elixir Tess
• Materials shared with Elixir Tess will be shared with GOBLET

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https://www.biocuration.org/call-for-biocuration-training-materials/

Training

ISB Zenodo Community

Share ‘grey’ literature documentation that can be made available to the biocuration community

• For example:
• RFIs
• Workshop reports
• Ontology documentation
• Curation guidelines

https://zenodo.org/communities/isb/

Remember-- Discount for DATABASE publication

DATABASE is the official journal of the ISB since 2013. This is an Open Source Oxford University Press publication. Since 2009 they have published papers associated with the Biocuration meeting as a Virtual Issue.

Members of the ISB can receive a 20%discount on the open access fees associated with publishing in DATABASE. The first or corresponding author must be an ISB member.

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Perks!

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You can find us at:

@biocurator

intsocbio@gmail.com

Thanks!