ISCB Newsletter 7-4

I am honored to have been named the Chair of ISCB’s Public Affairs and Policies Committee. I believe the most important thing for us to do in the next year will be to engage more ISCB members from around the world in science policy issues of relevance to their lives and careers.

The Committee held an open meeting at ISMB/ECCB in Glasgow this past summer. We had been hoping to attract members interested in expanding our advocacy efforts to parts of the world beyond the USA. Unfortunately, everyone who attended was from the USA, so our focus during the committee meeting primarily addressed U.S. issues. We do hope that we will get interest from non-US members over the coming year.

The areas of interest identified at the ISMB/ECCB 2004 meeting included these:
• Minorities and under-represented communities amongst computational biology scientists
• Public discussion of new government restrictions on tools and data
• Ability of new investigators to obtain grants and other resources
• Allocation of funding to new areas of research
• Open source; reproducibility of results
• Open access to scientific literature
• URLs in grant proposals
• Discrimination: difficulties with US visas; negative attitudes toward foreign researchers in various countries
• Mechanisms for engaging other members in discussions

Anyone interested in joining the Committee or participating in ISCB activities related to public policy are encouraged to contact the committee via admin@iscb.org. And whether you plan to join the Committee or not, please let us know which of these issues, or others, you feel are important for ISCB to pursue. Our efforts are on behalf of all members, so your personal input is very valuable to us.

ISCB members that would like to be advised of Public Affairs activities and updates on a regular basis can select this new mailing list option within the membership registration process. Alternatively, current members can login to their current account to update mailing list options. See http://www.iscb.org/membership.shtml for links to new membership or current login.