Leading Professional Society for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Connecting, Training, Empowering, Worldwide
Leading Professional Society for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Connecting, Training, Empowering, Worldwide
Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,
On February 14, 2012, the following letter was personalized to each of the 39 members of the US House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee and successfully sent via fax to their congressional offices. We share this to keep you informed on ISCB's response to HR-3699, and also to invite you to use any parts of this letter for stating your own opposition to this legislation that threatens to limit public access to federally funded scientific research.
Dear Representative :
On behalf of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and its 1198 individual members from across the United States, we strongly oppose H.R. 3699, the "Research Works Act," introduced on December 16 and referred to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. This bill would prohibit federal agencies from requiring, as a condition of their research grant funding, that the public be guaranteed online access to the products of research funded by public tax dollars.
H.R. 3699 will limit American taxpayers in accessing the results of the crucial scientific research they funded. By reversing the growing trend for cooperation and collaboration made possible by the open and rapid sharing of information and research results, this bill will inhibit our ability to exploit scientific discoveries, stifle critical advances in life-saving scientific research, and impede the pace of innovation in all scientific disciplines.
Most critically, H.R. 3699 would reverse the highly successful National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy. The NIH Public Access Policy now gives millions of Americans public access to vital health care information from the NIH's PubMed Central database. Under the current policy, more than 90,000 new biomedical manuscripts are deposited for public accessibility each year. H.R. 3699 would abrogate this collection. This loss will seriously impede the ability of researchers, physicians, healthcare professionals, and families to access and use this critical health-related information in a timely manner.
H.R. 3699 affects not only the results of biomedical research produced by the NIH, but also scientific research from all other federal agencies. Access to critical information, paid for with taxpayers' money and addressing vital areas such as energy, public safety, the environment, and hundreds more, would be unfairly limited by this proposed legislation --- greatly to the detriment of the lives and well-being of the public, which funded the research in the first place.
In October 2010, ISCB published a public policy statement on "Open Access to Scientific and Technical Research Literature" (www.iscb.org/iscb-policy-statements/literature_open_access). This policy statement embraced Open Access even beyond the current NIH policy. The vision of individualized medicine offers many reasons for hope and a brighter future. Achieving such important goals poses immense challenges for the discipline of computational biology. No single research institution is ready for a challenge of this magnitude, so we have learned to join forces and to share scientific results and information. The objective of ISCB's statement on Open Access is to increase the availability of scientific results and developments in our field well beyond what is currently accomplished by the NIH. An excerpt from this statement:
The International Society for Computational Biology strongly advocates free, open, public, online: (i) access by person or machine to the publicly-funded archival scientific and technical research literature; and (ii) computational reuse, integration, and distillation of that literature into higher-order knowledge elements.
We strongly urge you to permit and encourage the NIH and other agencies to ensure timely, public access to the results of research funded with taxpayer dollars. Please oppose H.R. 3699.
Sincerely,
Scott Markel, Ph.D., Chair of ISCB Publication Committee
Richard Lathrop, Ph.D., Chair of ISCB Public Affairs & Policies Committee
Burkhard Rost, Ph.D., ISCB President
Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,
The opportunity is soon closing to submit a Highlights paper to ISMB 2012. We invite the submission of full papers that have been published or accepted for publication in peer-review journals between January 1, 2011 and the submission deadline of March 2, 2012. Publications that are "in press" and already linked on the journal website are also welcome.
A group of editors will select the papers to be presented at the meeting, considering the impact of the work on the field, the likelihood that the work will make a good presentation, and the relevance to biomedical research, in general. Accepted presenters for the Highlights Track are required to make the presentation themselves, and must register and pay to attend the conference.
Click on the link above for full details and guidelines. From there you can also access the Highlights Track Submission Site to submit your published paper today.
This 20th Anniversary ISMB presents an exceptional line-up of keynote speakers that you will not want to miss:
Several additional opportunities exist for presentation at the conference, including Workshops, Posters, Technology demonstrations, Late Breaking Research abstracts, and the 8th annual Student Council Symposium. You can find the submission deadlines and links to each of the open calls on the conference home page.
Registration will open in mid-March. Please help spread the word for the strongest possible participation by sharing this mail with your colleagues and collaborators.
We look forward to welcoming you to Long Beach in July.
Sincerely,
Burkhard Rost, Highlights Chair, ISMB 2012
on behalf of the Highlights Committee
Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,
When making your conference plans for this year, don't forget the following ISCB-affiliated conferences. Each offers unique learning opportunities for you and your colleagues to further advance the understanding of our science and the communities we serve. ISCB members are offered a special discount just for being a member. Scroll down for details on upcoming key dates and opportunities.
Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,
The 20th Anniversary ISMB conference
will be held July 15-17 in Long Beach, California - and we want you there!
The above links will take you to the full details and
guidelines for these ISMB presentation opportunities. From there you can also
access the submission system to submit your work today.
The LBR
Track provides authors an opportunity to present truly late breaking
research to ISMB delegates. As submitted abstracts, there is no requirement to
publish in the conference proceedings, nor to have previously published
elsewhere. Therefore, work that is in progress and planned for future
publication is welcome, and the LBR track is ideal for experimentalists as well
as computer scientists. LBR presentations run in parallel to other conference
sessions and accepted submissions will be given a 20-minute presentation slot
(plus 5 minutes for questions) in the conference agenda.
Posters
will be displayed and presented in one of two sessions during the
conference. Posters are intended to convey a scientific result and are not
advertisements for commercial software packages. Posters may cover any area of
computational biology, and purely experimental work is encouraged. Posters must
include original work that is unpublished or published after August 1, 2011.
* A note about Travel Fellowships: All student and post docs accepted for
presentation in the Proceedings, Highlights, and Late Breaking Research tracks,
along with Poster presenters accepted from the call for posters, are eligible to
apply for travel fellowship funding. An invitation to apply for a Travel
Fellowship is sent to each author who submitted work that was accepted for any
of these tracks (note that submitters to the Late Call for Posters that will
open later this month are not eligible for travel fellowship funding). If the
submitter is not a student or post doc, but the work will be presented by a
co-author named on the submission who is a student or post doc, the invitation
can be passed to that person if funding is necessary to attend the conference.
Due to limited funds, not all eligible applicants can be funded. We are
typically able to fund no more than 20-30% of applicants, and awarded funds are
limited to 50% of the total estimated costs to attend the conference, making
additional funding from the presenter's institution or other sources necessary.
Full details on the ISMB Travel Fellowship program will be available on the
conference website within the next few days.
Additional opportunities still exist for presentations
at the conference that are not eligible for Travel Fellowship funding. These
include Workshops (March 10th deadline), Technology demonstrations (April 20th
deadline), and Late Posters (opening March 19th with April 20th deadline). The
8th annual Student Council Symposium is also accepting submissions through April
2nd, and symposium presenters are eligible for special Travel Fellowship funding
secured and awarded by the Student Council. You can find the submission
deadlines and links to each of these remaining calls on the conference home page
at ISMB 2012.
Registration will open in just a couple of weeks, so please
help spread the word for the strongest possible participation by sharing this
mail with your colleagues and collaborators.
The ISMB 2012 Conference
Co-Chairs and every member of the Scientific Organizing Committee looks forward
to welcoming you to Long Beach this July!
Sincerely,
LBR
Chair: Olga Troyanskaya, Princeton University, United States
LBR Co-chair: Florian Markowetz, Cambridge Research Institute,
United Kingdom
LBR Co-chair: Ioannis Xenarios, Swiss
Institute of Bioinformatics, Geneva, Switzerland
and
Posters Chair: Yana Bromberg, Rutgers, The State University of New
Jersey, United States
Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,
As has been reported widely, the
Research Works Act (RWA) that was introduced to the U.S. House of
Representatives late last year was withdrawn by the bill's sponsors on February
27th. ISCB took a strong stand against this bill that posed the latest threat to
public access to federally funded research results. ISCB President, Burkhard
Rost, together with Richard Lathrop, ISCB Public Affairs & Policies Committee
Chair, and Scott Markel, ISCB Publications and Communications Committee Chair,
signed a letter expressing our opposition and emphasizing the importance of the
ISCB
Public Policy Statement on Open Access to Scientific and Technical Research
Literature. The letter was personalized and sent to each of the 39 members
of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and the
content of the letter was shared with all ISCB members and many of our
scientific colleagues around the world. As a result, several scientific news
publications and blogs reported on ISCB's efforts, and we considered it a
victory when Elsevier withdrew its support of RWA days later and the bill was
withdrawn soon thereafter.
Although the tides may be turning in favor of
public access in the long run, it is doubtful that this will be the last veiled
attempt to obstruct such access. If you are a member of ISCB and have not yet
signed on to our policy statement, you can still do so at any time via the link
to current signatories on the policy page noted above.
Thank you,
BJ Morrison McKay, ISCB Executive Officer
on behalf of Burkhard Rost,
Richard Lathrop, Scott Markel, and the ISCB Board of Directors