The ISCB website is hosted by the
San Diego Supercomputer Center

Internal online resources for ISCB staff and volunteer leaders (password protected): Executive Committee, Board Members, Staff, Committees

**If you've reached this page in error trying to reach the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics, click here.**

Copyright © 2003 International Society for Computational Biology. All rights reserved.

1. ISCB Presents 2004 Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award to Dr. David Lipman
2. ISCB Awards the 2004 Overton Prize to Dr. Uri Alon
3. 2003 Call for Nominations
4. The International Society for Computational Biology Introduces New Executive Committee Officers
5. The International Society for Computational Biology Announces Annual Overton Prize and Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award
6. The International Society for Computational Biology is Now Seeking Nominations for the Following Annual Awards
7. ISCB Statement on Bioinformatics Software Availability
8. APBioNet, Asia's Largest Bioinformatics Organization, Signs Affiliation Agreement with the International Society for Computational Biology
9. Oxford University Press Initiative Wins Full Approval from ISCB Board of Directors
10. ISCB Letter to Science
11. ISCB Discussion on Global Expression Analysis

San Diego—August 24, 2004—The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) named Dr. David Lipman, director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) as the second winner of its annual Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award. The prize was awarded at the ISCB's annual meeting, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), held in conjunction with the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB), in Glasgow, Scotland, from July 31 to August 4.

The Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award recognizes members of the computational biology community who are more than 12 to 15 years post-degree and have made major contributions to the field of computational biology through research, education, service, or a combination of the three. Dr. Lipman delivered the annual Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award keynote lecture on August 4 at ISMB/ECCB.

"Over the course of his distinguished career, Dr. Lipman contributed to several of the most important tools used in the analysis of gene sequence data, and managed the growth of many of the most essential public scientific databases. His vision and leadership of the NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information has not only altered the course of computational biology, but of science as a whole," said Larry Hunter of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, chair of the ISCB award committee.

Dr. Lipman’s first research efforts in computational biology began after his medical training at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Subsequently, he joined the Mathematical Research Branch of the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases as a Research Fellow. In his research on computational methods, he developed widely used tools for searching biological sequence databases.

Dr. Lipman’s search method papers have been cited nearly 40,000 times and are considered landmarks that have served as the basis for the discovery of biological functions for unknown sequences, furthering the understanding of the molecular basis of human disease. Among his scientific contributions are the some of the canonical software of computational biology. This includes the Wilbur-Lipman algorithm, written in 1983 and considered to be the first "rapid search tool" for molecular biology databases and which was used for the PDGF/v-sis homology; FASTP, a biological sequence comparison program for searching protein and DNA, written in 1985 with William Pearson; FASTA also written with Pearson in 1988; BLAST, written with several colleagues in 1990; and BLAST2 and PSIBLAST, written with several colleagues in 1997.

Since 1989, Dr. Lipman has been the Director of the NCBI, a leading research center in computational biology, the creators of PubMed, one of the most heavily used sites in the world for the search and retrieval of biomedical information. He still remains active in research, most recently publishing a paper comparing mRNAs in eukaryotes in Nucleic Acids Research. He has received numerous awards in his career, including three Public Health Service Outstanding Service Medals and the National Institutes of Health Director’s Award. He is also a member of a number of prestigious associations including the National Academy of Sciences.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) was established in 1988 as a division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), based at the United States’ National Institutes of Health. NCBI creates automated systems for storing and analyzing knowledge about molecular biology, biochemistry, and genetics; facilitates the use of such databases and software by the research community; coordinates efforts to gather biotechnology information; and performs research into advanced methods of computer based information processing for analyzing the structure and function of biologically important molecules.

San Diego—August 24, 2004—The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) has awarded Uri Alon, senior scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, with the 2004 Overton Prize. The prize was awarded at the ISCB's annual meeting, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), held in conjunction with the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB), in Glasgow, Scotland, from July 31 to August 4.

The Overton Prize was established by the ISCB in memory of G. Christian Overton, a major contributor to the field of bioinformatics and member of the ISCB Board of Directors who died unexpectedly in 2000. The prize is awarded for outstanding accomplishment to a scientist in the early- to mid-stage of his or her career who has already made a significant contribution to the field of computational biology through research, education, service, or a combination of the three.

"Uri Alon epitomizes the spirit of the Overton Prize. Despite being in a relatively early stage of his career, he has made significant contributions to computational biology, particularly in the areas of network motifs and the design principles of biological networks," said Larry Hunter of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, chair of the ISCB Awards Committee.

Alon delivered the annual Overton keynote lecture, entitled "Design principles of biological networks," on August 4 at this summer's conference.

Alon received his PhD in theoretical physics from the Weizmann Institute, where he studied statistical mechanics and hydrodynamics. During Alon's graduate studies he became intrigued by the biological sciences after reading a biology textbook. Subsequently, he headed for his postdoctoral studies at Princeton determined to learn experimental biology.

"It was like a thriller with miracles on each page!" Alon said. "It was nothing like physics, where matter just sits there--biology is matter that dances, machines that effortlessly self assemble, function perfectly in the noisy chemical soup of the cell, and then dissolve when not needed." He credits Dov Shvarts of the Negev Nuclear Research Center, David Mukamel of The Weizmann Institute, and Stan Leibler of the Rockefeller University for providing significant career guidance and inspiration.

Since 2000, Alon’s lab at Weizmann has studied gene regulation networks experimentally and theoretically, using E. coli and mammalian cell-lines as model systems. His research employs accurate, high temporal-resolution measurement of gene expression from living cells and mathematical modeling to discover the design principles of biological networks. This led to the definition of "network motifs," recurring circuit patterns in biological networks, and experimental demonstration of their information-processing functions.

"Biological networks pose a challenge to science that has never yet been addressed--understanding a system with thousands of heavily interacting components, none of which can be neglected. This at first blush seems impossible," said Alon. "But the fact that these networks evolved to function appears--to us optimists at least--to have a surprising side-effect: it makes their structure understandable to human beings."

"If we manage to understand these networks, and the basic principles that make them tick, it will be the first time science has comprehended a truly complex natural system. This may open up possibilities for understanding complex networks of the type that occur in the tough and crucial sciences of the 21st century, such as ecology and sociology."

Among his most recent publications this year are the “Dynamics of the p53-Mdm2 feedback loop in living cells,” in Nature Genetics and “Super-families of evolved and designed networks,” in Science.

ISCB Members are encouraged to put forward nominees for Director(s) and for the Executive Officer positions of President-Elect. Nominations should be made online at http://www.iscb.org/nominate.php no later than April 4, or until April 18 with the endorsement of five ISCB members. Directors will take office upon election at the annual face-to-face Board of Directors meeting held during ISMB, and will serve for three years. President-Elect will take office in January of the following year, and will serve for one year as President-Elect, followed by two years as President. They will simultaneously be members of the Board of Directors for a three-year term.

In order to be eligible to be a Director candidate, a person must be an ISCB member in good standing, and must pledge to make every reasonable effort to attend the monthly Board of Directors teleconference meetings, as well as the face-to-face Annual Board Meeting (held at the ISMB conference). Each Candidate is also encouraged to attend the public portion of the Board of Directors meeting prior to the election to announce that he/she is standing for election and to interact with the existing board.

In order to be eligible to be an Officer candidate, a person must be an ISCB member in good standing, must have been a member for at least one (1) year, and must pledge to make every reasonable effort to attend both the monthly Executive Committee teleconference meetings and the monthly Board of Director teleconference meetings, as well as the face-to-face Annual Board Meeting (held at the ISMB conference). Each Candidate is also encouraged to attend the public portion of the board meeting prior to the election to announce that he/she is standing for election and to interact with the existing board.

The nomination form includes the name, affiliation, e-mail address of the person being nominated, along with an assurance that the indicated person meets the qualifications and is willing to stand for election for the position in question. The nomination also includes a few sentences of justification that makes the strongest case possible for the person being nominated.

Before April 5, nominations will be accepted from individuals Between April 5 and April 18, nominations will require endorsements from at least 5 ISCB members in good standing.

SAN DIEGO -- The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) recently introduced its new officers, who will serve as the Society's senior leadership through its Executive Committee for the next two years.

The uncontested elections, open to the more than 1,700 ISCB members, confirmed Michael Gribskov as president, and reelected Anna Tramontano as vice-president, David Rocke as treasurer, and Barbara Bryant as secretary. Philip Bourne, immediate past president, will remain on the Board of Directors until 2005. Terms for the new officials began on January 21, 2003.

Newly elected President Michael Gribskov, who previously served as the ISCB vice president, will continue to follow the vision set forth by Bourne. An adjunct associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, and senior scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Gribskov has been an ISCB member since 1997. He has served on the Board of Directors since 1999 and chaired both conferences and education committees over the past three years. Gribskov emphasized, "Our impact must be felt in many areas: we must work to inform and affect government policy, we must provide better resources for instruction and for the implementation of training programs, we must continue to support scientific meetings of the highest quality, and we must continue to support and nurture new ideas and approaches to science." Gribskov has already been working with the committee chairs on those issues in support of the advancement of the field of computational biology.

A champion of the ISCB's Affiliated Regional Groups program, which was introduced in 2002, Anna Tramontano's re-election to the vice presidency ensures a continued focus on strengthening the ISCB's ties with regional bioinformatics groups. Tramontano, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Rome "La Sapienza," said she would like to see the ISCB more active in influencing governmental roles in European funding. "As for Europe, I started to discuss the issue of a possible cooperation between ISCB and EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization), with promising preliminary results."

Re-elected ISCB Treasurer David Rocke will continue to handle the ISCB's financial issues. Rocke, professor of applied science, epidemiology, and preventive medicine at the University of California, Davis, said, "The ISCB needs to grow to accommodate growth in the field, needs to adopt new programs, and needs to develop into a fully-professional organization with steady financial planning." His working knowledge of business disciplines, including finance, accounting, and management information systems, provides a basis from which he will continue to maintain the ISCB's financial stability.

Barbara Bryant's re-election to ISCB secretary will be a plus for the ISCB's institutional memory, as her organizational and record-keeping skills proved invaluable throughout her previous term. Bryant, associate director of bioinformatics at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, sees major issues facing the ISCB as, "continuing to improve the quality of the Society-associated journals, conferences, and education at the intersection of life sciences and computation; taking advantage of opportunities to influence governments throughout the world; and determining and acting on the responsibilities of scientists and engineers to society as a whole." Also, by accepting the nomination to be the ISCB representative on the Board of Directors of the Federation of Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), Bryant will help to broaden the long-term, strategic goals of the ISCB through collaboration and partnership with other FASEB member society representatives.

The ISCB bylaws require that each officer serve on the board of directors for a minimum of one year prior to becoming an Executive Committee member. Each of these individuals, like their counterparts on the ISCB Board of Directors, volunteers their time, expertise, and guidance to the Society.

About the ISCB

The ISCB a scholarly society dedicated to advancing the scientific understanding of living systems through computation, with an emphasis on the role of computing and informatics in advancing molecular biology. Founded in 1997, the ISCB serves a global membership with the goal of increased understanding of the significance of bioinformatics in the scientific community, government, and the public at large. More about the ISCB can be found at: http://www.iscb.org/.

SAN DIEGO—March 5, 2003—The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) today announced the 2003 winners of its annual Overton Prize and the first-ever Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award. Both prizes will be given to the recipients at the ISCB's annual meeting, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), to be held in Brisbane, Australia, from June 29 to July 3.

The Overton Prize, which is awarded for outstanding achievement in the field of computational biology by a scientist in the early- to mid- phase of his or her career will go to W. James Kent, an assistant research scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award, being presented for the first time this year, honors a career of accomplishment in bioinformatics, and will be awarded to David Sankoff, Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics at the University of Ottawa and a member of the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques at the Université de Montréal. Both will present keynote speeches at ISCB.

The Overton Prize was established by the ISCB in memory of G. Christian Overton, a major contributor to the field of bioinformatics and member of the ISCB Board of Directors who died unexpectedly in 2000. The prize, now in its third year, is awarded for outstanding accomplishment to a scientist in the early- to mid- stage of his or her career who has already made a significant contribution to the field of computational biology through research, education, service, or a combination of the three.

This year's Overton Prize winner, W. James Kent, is best known as the researcher who "saved" the human genome project, a feat chronicled in the New York Times. With little more than a month before the company Celera was to present a complete draft of the human genome to the White House in 2000, Kent wrote GigAssembler, a program that produced the first full working draft assembly of the human genome, which kept the data freely available in the public domain.

Kent's main scientific goal has been to understand gene regulation by building bioinformatics tools such as his Intronerator system for exploring the genome of C. elegans; the program WABA, one of the first pair-HMMs for alignment of genomic DNA of two species; Improbiser, an expectation-maximization method to discover and cluster potential transcription factor binding sites; and the popular BLAT, which rapidly searches full genomes at both the DNA and protein levels.

Over the past 30 years, David Sankoff, the ISCB Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award winner, formulated and contributed to many of the fundamental problems in computational biology.

In sequence comparison, he introduced the quadratic version of the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm, developed the first statistical test for alignments, initiated the study of the limit behavior of random sequences with Vaclav Chvatal and formulated the multiple alignment problem, based on minimum evolution over a phylogenetic tree. In the study of RNA secondary structure, he developed algorithms based on general energy functions for multiple loops and for simultaneous folding and alignment, and performed the earliest studies of parametric folding and automated phylogenetic filtering.

With Robert Cedergren, Sankoff collaborated on the first studies of the evolution of the genetic code based on tRNA sequences. His contributions to phylogenetics include early models for horizontal transfer, a general approach for optimizing the nodes of a given tree, a method for rapid bootstrap calculations, a generalization of the nearest neighbor interchange heuristic, various constraint, consensus and supertree problems, the computational complexity of several phylogeny problems with William Day, and a general technique for phylogenetic invariants with Vincent Ferretti.

Over the last fifteen years he has focused on the evolution of genomes as the result of chromosomal rearrangement processes. Here he introduced the computational analysis of genomic edit distances, including parametric versions, the distribution of gene numbers in conserved segments in a random model with Joseph Nadeau, phylogeny based on gene order with Mathieu Blanchette and David Bryant, generalizations to include multi-gene families, including algorithms for analyzing genome duplication and hybridization with Nadia El-Mabrouk, and the statistical analysis of gene clusters with Dannie Durand. Sankoff is also well-known in linguistics for his methods of studying grammatical variation and change in speech communities, the quantification of discourse analysis and production models of bilingual speech.

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is now seeking nominations for the following annual awards:

First Annual ISCB Accomplishment Award
Specifically recognizes senior members of the computational biology community who have made major contributions through research, education, and/or service.

Third Annual Overton Prize
Awarded for outstanding achievement in the field of computational biology by a scientist in the early to mid phase of his or her career.
* This award was established by the ISCB in memory of G. Christian Overton, a major contributor to the field of bioinformatics and member of the ISCB Board of Directors who died unexpectedly in 2000. The Overton Prize was awarded to Christopher Burge of MIT in 2001, and David Baker of HHMI and the University of Washington in 2002.

Recipients of both awards will be invited to present keynote talks at the 11th Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference in Brisbane, Australia, June 29-July 3, 2003. These are international awards, and nominations from all regions are encouraged.

Please send nominations, including a brief biosketch, your assessment of their key contributions, and 2 or 3 key citations to admin@iscb.org no later than the submission deadline of Friday, November 15, 2002. All nominations will be treated confidentially.

Comment on this statement: iscb-software@iscb.org

Browse the mail discussion

I. Introduction
Conditions of bioinformatics software availability are extremely important to the field of bioinformatics. The ISCB, a professional society of 1300 bioinformatics scientists, has discerned significant confusion in recent months regarding the topic of software availability, and is disseminating this statement to clarify several issues regarding software availability, and to make recommendations on software availability policies for government agencies that fund bioinformatics research.

II. Recommendations

1. The term “open source” has taken on many different meanings. This term creates confusion in discussions of software availability; therefore the term should be carefully qualified to indicate which variation of the open-source model is intended.
2. Government agencies that fund bioinformatics research should NOT REQUIRE that software produced with government research funds must be distributed under open-source license (particularly given the ambiguity in the meaning of that term). Because of the complexity inherent in software, no single distribution model is appropriate for all research projects. Government agencies should require clear statements of software availability in grant proposals.
3. As reviewers of bioinformatics grant applications, ISCB scientists have noted that these applications often contain confusing or unclear statements regarding the availability of software that will be developed under government grant funds. This statement contains several definitions of software availability that ISCB recommends for use in bioinformatics grant applications. ISCB recommends one of those definitions as a minimal requirement of software availability that funding agencies should require.

III. ISCB Levels of Software Availability
The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) provides the following definitions of software availability. It is ISCB’s intent that these definitions be a standard reference. It is recommended that all software availability be defined in these terms (or specific stated variations thereof) and stated in all publications, grant applications, and other documents that describe software availability.

ISCB recommends that government funding agencies that support bioinformatics research, require a minimum of ISCB Level 0 Availability.

The levels of availability listed here are not meant to be exhaustive. Researchers may want to define variations to these levels, but ISCB strongly suggests that at least Level 0f Availability be maintained.

For all levels of availability, the licensee must clearly acknowledge the contributions of the author(s) of the original software in all redistributions.

ISCB Level 0 Availability:

a. For Research Use: The software will be available free of charge, in binary form, on an “as is” basis for research purposes to educational institutions, non-profit research institutes, government research laboratories, and individuals, for non-exclusive use, without the right of the licensee to further redistribute the software.

b. For Commercial Use: The software will be available in binary form, on an “as is” basis to commercial institutions, possibly for a fee, for non-exclusive use, without the right of the licensee to redistribute the software.

ISCB Level 1 Availability (“No fee”):
The software will be available free of charge to all institutions, in binary form, on an “as is basis”, for non-exclusive use, without the right of the licensee to further redistribute the software.

ISCB Level 2 Availability (“No fee, source code for research use”):
Same as ISCB Level 1; in addition, source code is available for research use to educational institutions, non-profit research institutes, government research laboratories, and individuals, without the right to redistribute the source code.

ISCB Level 3 Availability (“No fee, source code to all”):
Same as ISCB Level 1; in addition, source code is available to commercial institutions.

ISCB Level 4 Availability (“No fee, unlimited redistribution, with source code”):
The software will be available free of charge to all institutions and individuals, in binary and source-code forms, on an “as is” basis, for non-exclusive use. The licensee may redistribute and/or resell the original software including the source code, and may redistribute and/or resell any modifications or derivative works created by the licensee. The licensee must clearly acknowledge the contributions of the author(s) of the original software in all redistributions.

The statements contained in this site do not constitute, and should not be construed as, giving legal advice. Nothing in this site is intended to constitute the giving of legal advice. The reader should consult with counsel before pursuing a course of action in reliance on information contained in this site.

posted 5/21/2002

SINGAPORE, PALO ALTO, AND SAN DIEGO – May 10, 2002 - The president of the Pacific Rim’s foremost bioinformatics organization, the Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet), today signed an agreement of affiliation with the world’s largest bioinformatics group, the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). Both groups are nonprofit societies dedicated to the advancement of scientific understanding of living systems through computation.

Through the affiliation agreement, the two groups will be able to extend their reach in promoting bioinformatics, specifically, the development of the bioinformatics network infrastructure, the exchange of data and information, the development of training programs, workshops and symposia.

"We have more than 400 individual members in more than a dozen economies in the Asia Pacific, from Russia to New Zealand, from India to USA. All our members need to be plugged into the international scene, and we are proud to be affiliated with the ISCB," said Professor S Subbiah, President of APBioNet.

"The ISCB is thrilled at the opportunity to connect with APBioNet. Affiliation with such a prestigious group will benefit the membership of the both organizations as well as strengthening our ability to promote bioinformatics as a scientific discipline worldwide," said Philip E. Bourne, president of the ISCB, director of Integrative Biosciences at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and professor of pharmacology at UCSD. APBioNet is the most recent geographical group to join the ISCB, which has eight other affiliates worldwide.

The affiliation agreement involves cross-promotion of the two societies through publications and conferences, a voice for APBioNet to promote regional matters on the ISCB board, and potential support for APBioNet’s regional activities, such as travel sponsorships. According to Bourne, the ISCB hopes the new agreement will provide the ISCB with an increased understanding of issues in bioinformatics in the Asia Pacific region as well as outreach to APBioNet’s membership.
APBioNet has a strong record of outreach around the Pacific Rim, encouraging collaboration in the field of bioinformatics in the Asia Pacific region as well as promoting awareness among biologists of the need to acquire bioinformatics skills. With over 1300 members in 42 countries, ISCB has similar aims on a global scale, and hosts the annual international conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB).

"We are pleased to achieve peer-to-peer mutual recognition with our counterparts in the European Molecular Biology Network (EMBnet) earlier this year. This affiliation with ISCB will give an even bigger boost to our initiatives in our region " said Professor Shoba Ranganathan, Vice President of APBioNet, who is also Secretary of S* Alliance and Founding Chair of the WEB series.

"The APBioNet secretariat hopes to work closely with ISCB in the areas of promoting greater awareness and outreach. More importantly, we hope to follow up with key projects to build up the bioinformatics information infrastructure, the manpower capability and the human networking which ISCB affiliation will open up to us." said Dr Tan Tin Wee, the founding Convenor of APBioNet and Secretariat currently coordinating the APBioGRID and the bioinformatics curriculum initiative in APBioNet.
About APBioNet

----------

The Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet) is a non-profit, non-governmental, international organization founded in 1998. It focuses on the promotion of bioinformatics in the Asia Pacific Region. Since 1998, its mission has been to pioneer the growth and development of bioinformatics awareness, training, education, infrastructure, resources and research amongst member countries and economies. Its work includes the technical coordination, liaison and/or affiliation with other international bodies such as the EMBnet and ISCB.

APBioNet has more than 20 organizational and 400 individual members from over 12 countries in the Asia Pacific region, and members include those from industry, academia, research, government, investors and international organizations. APBioNet has coordinated or co-organized more than 20 international and national meetings in cooperation with members in different economies. It is spearheading a number of key bioinformatics initiatives in the region in collaboration with international organizations such as APAN, APEC, S* Alliance and A-IMBN. More about APBioNet can be found at: http://www.apbionet.org/.

About ISCB
----------
The ISCB a scholarly society dedicated to advancing the scientific understanding of living systems through computation, with an emphasis is on the role of computing and informatics in advancing molecular biology. Founded in 1997, the ISCB serves a global membership with the goal of increased understanding of the significance of bioinformatics in the scientific community, government, and the public at large. More about the ISCB can be found at: http://www.iscb.org/.

# # #
Asia:
Dr Tin Wee Tan
Secretariat
Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network
4 Kent Ridge Road
Singapore 119213
Phn: +65-9664-0347
Fax: +65-6779-0724
Email: sec@apbionet.org
Web: www.apbionet.org

USA:
BJ Morrison McKay, Executive Officer
International Society for Computational Biology
Pharmaceutical Sciences Building
Room 3230
9500 Gilman Drive
MC 0743
La Jolla, CA 92093-0743 USA
Tel: +1 760 522 8805
Fax: +1 760 888 0313
Email: bj@iscb.org
http://www.iscb.org

On April 8, 2002, David Prosser, Journals Commissioning Editor for Oxford University Press, announced an initiative by OUP to provide free online access to Bioinformatics and other OUP published journals for developing countries, and reduced rate access for transitional countries. Aimed at helping information-starved researchers in some of the world's most economically challenged countries gain access to material in academic research journals, this initiative will be advertised and promoted through the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Both organizations have demonstrated an especially impressive closeness to and empathy with the information-poor in the developing world.

"These countries have economies whose weakness has meant that even the ability to feed, clothe, and provide a basic elementary level education for their populations has often proved an unattainable goal. Resources for the acquisition of the high-level research found in first-world journals are an impossible luxury," stated Prosser. To combat this inequity of information, OUP is proposing to offer free online access to Bioinformatics until at least the end of 2004 to any established not-for-profit educational institution from the 67 absolute poorest countries in the world (as measured by the United Nations Development Programme's "Human Development Index" and by separate indices based on GNP and GNI per capita).

Additionally OUP is proposing that from January 2003 online access to Bioinformatics be offered to all educational institutions in Medium Income Economies at a "single figure" sum per country. This group of countries represents a much wider range of wealth and information deprivation and includes some countries (like India, Brazil, South Africa and Thailand) with well-established research infrastructures. Nevertheless, there is still considerable under-investment in information provision in these countries considering the size of their population and in comparison with what is spent in "first world" countries.

The Officers and Board of Directors of ISCB share OUP’s enthusiasm for extending the readership of Bioinformatics to the hundreds of thousands of researchers in developing and transitional countries who would otherwise have no chance of gaining access to its invaluable research. A motion was approved at the April 2002 Board Meeting to investigating how ISCB, as a worldwide organization, might participate in underwriting a portion of the costs associated with fulfilling such an initiative.

Dear Members:
After considerable discussion among the ISCB Board the following letter was submitted to Science Magazine. We encourage you to support these statements and welcome comments to admin@iscb.org.

The letter..
Science Magazine has a long standing policy that molecular sequence data supporting publications must be made available through a public repository at or before the time of publication. The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB; http://www.iscb.org), on behalf of its 1300 members, is concerned about the repeated acceptance of manuscripts for publication in Science in violation of this policy (1,2). Deposition of sequence data with public repositories guarantees uniform free access to the data, facilitates the development and use of sequence analysis and sequence comparison software and assures the archival preservation of the data. Free access to the data supporting a publication is fundamental to the scientific process. The consensus in the scientific community supporting deposition of molecular sequence data with public repositories is undermined by the practice of making exceptions to this policy for some groups and not others.

1) Venter et al Science, 16 February 2001, p. 1304
2) Goff et al Science, 6 April 2002, p. 92

Sincerely,
Philip E. Bourne PhD
President, ISCB

posted: 5/1/2002

Background
Global expression analysis (GEA) is an example of a widely used technique that generates data with many applications. Publications based on global expression analysis (GEA) inevitably involve abstraction and selective presentation of the data. To evaluate GEA papers and place them incontext, the full data set must be accessible to the scientific community. Further, many forms of analysis (e.g. clustering and classification) depend on access to the full data set and can not be replicated on partial data sets. A similar situation may soon arise for the analysis of the massive amount of data produced by other technologies such as mass spectroscopy and yeast two hybrid screens.

There are several technologies for GEA including "genechips", spotted cDNA arrays, spotted oligo arrays and Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE). While these techniques differ in detail, they share the common goal of defing the global pattern of gene expression. GEA data are a well-defined class of data and GEA techniques are widely used. Enforcement of data release by journals and funding agencies has played an essential role in the development of public data repositories such as PDB and GenBank. To be enforceable, these data release and data submissions policies need to clearly define the class of data to which they apply.

Motion
The ISCB believes that all data sets supporting scientific publications should be publicly accessible in their entirety. As standard formats and public repositories are developed for data, journals and funding agencies should require submission of data to public repositories. Global expression analysis (GEA) has emerged as a well-defined class of data and public repositories for GEA data are now available. Journals publishing GEA work and funding agencies sponsoring GEA studies should require release of the full GEA data sets at the time of publication. The use of standard formats and deposit with public repositories should be strongly encouraged.

About the International Society for Computational Biology: http://www.iscb.org/
The International Society for Computational Biology is dedicated to advancing the scientific understanding of living systems through
computation; our emphasis is on the role of computing and informatics in advancing molecular biology. The Society aims to serve its membership by facilitating scientific communication through meetings, tutorials, publications and by electronic means; by collecting and distributing information about training, education and employment in the field; and by increasing the understanding of the significance of our endeavor in the larger scientific community and in the public at large.

The society has more than 1300 members and runs the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) meeting annually, the largest
conference devoted to bioinformatics and computational biology. For more information about this statement, contact:

Phil Bourne, President, ISCB, bourne@sdsc.edu
Michael Gribskov, Vice President, gribskov@sdsc.edu
Anna Tramontano, Vice President, Anna.Tramontano@uniroma1.it
Administrator, ISCB, admin@iscb.org

The board of directors and officers are listed at here.