Engaging the scientific community in high-quality biocuration: a report on the International Society for Biocuration workshop, 'Maximizing community curation for the benefit of all'
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Biological knowledgebases traditionally rely on expert, professional curation of the research literature to maintain up-to-date collections of data organized in machine-readable form. However, despite the increasing amount of curatable biomedical knowledge, support for knowledgebases is declining, leaving these resources no alternative but to explore additional ways of updating and maintaining content. One way in which knowledgebases have addressed this problem is by engaging researchers to help curate their published papers, a process generally known as 'community curation'. As helpful as community curation can be, though, it is not universally adopted and, for groups that do have it, there is a wide range of approaches. To learn about existing community curation pipelines and explore possibilities for working towards a common approach, we organized a workshop, Maximizing Community Curation for the Benefit of All, at the 18th International Biocuration Conference, hosted by the Stowers Institute for Medical Research. Our aim was to examine the different strategies that groups use, share successes, failures, and ongoing challenges, and produce suggested deliverables for broader adoption of common best practices and tools for effective community curation. Representatives from 18 different resources, ranging from model organism and specialty knowledgebases to journals and literature resources, presented their work. The result was a comprehensive assessment of the state-of-the-art for community curation and an in-depth discussion on how community curation can become standard practice for maintaining timely, highquality biological resources that will continue to provide scientists with the essential information they need for their research.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Raciti, Daniela, Coort, Susan L. M., Grove, Christian, Hotchkiss, Jade, Jeffryes, Matt, Li, Nancy T., Lu, Zhiyong, Molcrette, Bastien, Naithani, Sushma, Nugnes, Maria Victoria, Ramsey, Jolene, Ranzinger, Rene, Reiser, Leonore, Ross, Karen E., Stevens, Garrett, Thaxton, Courtney, Toro, Sabrina, Wood, Valerie, Yook, Karen, Van Auken, Kimberly
Language: English
Subfield: Health Informatics
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funders: National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Oregon State University, Wellcome Trust, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Food Safety Authority, York University, European Commission, Universiteit Maastricht, National Institutes of Health, Directorate for Biological Sciences, Agricultural Research Service, Medical Research Council, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Cancer Institute, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, U.S. National Library of Medicine, H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, Common Fund
Awards: CIBR:BBSRC: Next generation collaborative annotation of genomes and synteny, G2247184637, CIBR:BBSRC: PanOryza: Globally coordinated genomes, proteomes and pathways for rice, Bringing Intrinsically Disordered Proteins to Biomedical Applications, Career Accelerator for Research Infrastructure Scientists, G3586280674, PomBase: A FAIR community resource advancing research from fission yeast to humans, Support to the Europe PMC initiative (2021-2026), National Resource for Network Biology (NRNB), WormBase: an evolving resource for nematode biology, G6670596429, G6815075985, The WikiPathways Project: At the Intersection of Big Data and Researcher Knowledge, G7408445768, Career Accelerator for Research Infrastructure Scientists, PomBase: A FAIR community resource advancing research from fission yeast to humans, G9000034852, G9000039139, Developing the Apollo software for high-throughput annotation of multiple genomes
OpenAlex ID: W7204921174