Call for ISCB Call for Leadership Nominations

Board Nominations Deadline: April 6, 2012

ISCB Officer and Student Council Leader Nominations Deadline: June 3, 2012

The International Society for Computational Biology is encouraging members to submit nominations for the Society's Board of Directors; the Officer positions of Vice President, Treasurer, and Secretary; and the Student Council Leadership positions of Chair, Vice-Chair, Secretary, Treasurer, and SC Rep to the ISCB Board. Nominations are submitted at www.iscb.org/nominate (you must login to your membership record to access the nomination form). In all cases, self nominations will not be accepted.

If you know of excellent candidates that meet the eligibility requirements below, please be sure to submit your nomination(s) right away.

• In order to be eligible for candidacy as a Director a person must be or become an ISCB member in good standing no later than the date he or she accepts the nomination. Acceptance is then completed by submitting a candidate statement by May 4, 2012.

• All Director candidates must pledge to make every reasonable effort to attend the bi-monthly Board teleconference beginning with a training period in October 2012 and the annual in-person Board of Directors meeting (held at the ISMB conference) at their own expense through completion of the three-year term that begins January 21, 2013.

• In order to be eligible to be an Officer candidate a person must have served on the ISCB Board of Directors for at least one year prior to January 2013, and be an ISCB member in good standing, or renew a lapsed membership no later than June 24, 2012.

• All Officer candidates must pledge to make every reasonable effort to attend the weekly Executive Committee teleconferences beginning with a training period by mid-October, 2012, the bi-monthly Board teleconferences beginning with a training period in October 2012, and the annual in-person Board of Directors meeting (held at the ISMB conference) at their own expense through completion of the two-year Officer term that begins January 21, 2013.

• The elected Officers will also serve concurrently on the Board of Directors for a term that ends January 21, 2016.

Nominations for Board of Directors will be accepted through April 6, 2012. Election of Board members will take place during the annual ISCB Board of Directors meeting in July 2012.

Nominations for Officers and Student Council Leaders will be accepted through June 3, 2012. Election of the Officers and Student Council Leaders will take place via online voting by the membership in July, 2012, including availability to a dedicated voting booth at the ISMB conference.

Each nomination requires the name, affiliation, and email address of the nominee, along with an assurance that the nominee meets the qualifications and is willing to stand for election for the position in question. The nomination must also include a few sentences of justification that makes the strongest case possible for the nominee.

Full information regarding the 2012 nominations/elections timeline, call for nominations, and Director and Officer responsibilities can be found at www.iscb.org/iscb-leadership-a-staff-/officers-and-board-directors/nomination-election-procedures.

We are looking forward to an active participation by the ISCB membership in the nominations and election process, and we thank you in advance for your qualified nominations.

Respectfully,

Dietlind Gerloff, Scott Markel, and Anna Tramontano
Co-Chairs, ISCB Nominations Committee

ISCB Response to Research Works Act HR-3699

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.

Last Call for Highlights Track Papers - deadline March 2, 2012

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:

• Richard Durbin, ISCB Fellow Keynote, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK
• Lawrence Hunter, University of Colorado School of Medicine, USA, together with Richard Lathrop, University of California-Irvine, USA, presenting the 20th Anniversary Keynote
• Andrej Sali, University of California-San Francisco, USA
• Barbara Wold, California Institute of Technology, USA
• Gunnar von Heijne, ISCB Sr. Scientist Award Winner, Stockholm University, Sweden
• Ziv Bar-Joseph, ISCB Overton Prize Winner, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

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.

• VizBi
• AMIA Summit on Translational Bioinformatics
• RECOMB
• BioIT-World Conference & Expo
• Brazilian Symposium on Bioinformatics
• ECCB
• InCoB

• Poster submission deadline: February 26th
• Regular registration still available with 15% discount for ISCB members.
• Virtual registration also an option for participation by streaming video and chat - deadline: March 2nd

• Registration is still open.
• ISCB members are eligible for a 10% registration discount - must use promotional code ISCB12.

• ISCB members are eligible for a 10%
• Poster submissions deadline: March 1st

• Register by March 9th and save
• ISCB members receive an additional 10% registration discount

• Full Paper submission deadline: March 19th
• ISCB members receive approx 14% registration discount - the greatest discounts are available until June 4th
• Short Paper submission deadline: June 25th

• Workshop and Tutorial deadline: March 30th
• Subscribe to the conference newsletter via the URL above for alerts on open calls, deadlines, and program updates.

• Paper submission deadline: April 1st
• Poster and all other submission deadlines: May 15th

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!

Final Call for Posters - deadline March 16th

Final Call for Late Breaking Research (LBR) Track Abstracts -deadline March 9th

Please note, these are the final two submission opportunities that create eligibility for travel fellowship funding*

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

ISCB Celebrates Withdrawal of Research Works Act

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

GLBIO 2012 Last Call for Posters

Attention all ISCB members, colleagues, and past GLBIO attendees,

The final opportunity to submit your work for presentation at the The Great Lakes Bioinformatics Conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan in May is now.

LAST CALL FOR POSTERS:
Poster Information & Abstract Submission Form - Deadline March 15, 2012

MARC TRAVEL FELLOWSHIP FUNDING AVAILABLE:
See below for details* - Deadline April 3, 2012

EARLY REGISTRATION CLOSING SOON:
Online Registration Information and Form Early Registration deadline April 15, 2012

* MARC travel fellowships are available for accepted presenters (oral and poster) who meet the following criteria: (1) Presenter is a US citizen or permanent resident, and (2) is from an underrepresented minority group, and (3) is a student (graduate or undergraduate), post-baccalaureate, or postdoctoral fellow, and (4) is the first author and will be presenting the oral or poster presentation at GLBIO 2012. MARC funding is also available for groups of one faculty member/mentor plus up to two students or post-baccalaureates form a minority institution. MARC funding for GLBIO is possible through ISCB's membership in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). Full details are available on the Travel Fellowships page of the GLBIO website. If you do not meet the eligibility requirements but know someone who could, please pass this notice to them immediately so they can meet the poster submission and MARC fellowship application deadlines before they expire.

We look forward to receiving your submission today and to welcoming you to Ann Arbor in May!

Sincerely,

Your GLBIO 2012 Steering/Organizing Committee

ISCB Education Committee Seeks Input on Identifying a Consensus Bioinformatics Curriculum

Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,

The ISCB Education Committee began working on a number of activities last fall related to developing recommendations for a bioinformatics curriculum. We have 3 subcommittees that are described below. A recap of this initiative can be found in the email included at the bottom of this message (dated September 14, 2011).

After completing an initial survey of the Education committee, we have drafted a manuscript that we would like to share with you. The manuscript is available on the blog mentioned below. We are interested in getting your comments on this draft. While we are soliciting feedback, we will continue to analyze the information we are collecting in our subcommittees and hope to incorporate this information in an updated document. We would be happy to have you join in this effort.

A blog has been set up to gather input: http://bioinfocurriculum.blogspot.com/. Login is not required.

We are particularly interested in hearing from you about:
1) ideas for publicizing these efforts and involving a broader cross-section of the computational biology community
2) the draft curriculum (a link to the document is provided on the blog page)
3) the plans to refine the curriculum (see the final paragraph of document)

To post your comments, you can click on the 'comment' link at the bottom of the blog. Please provide your comments by March 30th, 2012.

We are looking ahead to Long Beach and are organizing a Birds of a Feather (BoF) at ISMB 2012 to discuss bioinformatics curriculum guidelines (http://www.iscb.org/ismb2012-program/birds-of-a-feather). Perhaps you can join us in Long Beach to continue this discussion.

Thanks for your interest in this effort. We value your input.

Sincerely,
Fran Lewitter, Lonnie Welch and Russell Schwartz


SUBCOMMITTEE 1 (job opportunities):
Leader: Lonnie Welch
Members: Murlidharan Nair, Steve Jennings
Recent activity: review job postings on ISCB web site for skills required

SUBCOMMITTEE 2 (existing curricula):
Leader: Russell Schwartz
Members: Erik Bongcam-Rudloff, Celia van Gelder, Antoine H.C. van Kampen, Scott J. Emrich, Murlidharan Nair, Shifra Ben-Dor, Erich Baker
Recent Activity: review existing curricula at for Bioinformatics degree granting programs

SUBCOMMITTEE 3 (core facilities):
Leader: Fran Lewitter
Members: Erik Bongcam-Rudloff, Scott J. Emrich, Shifra Ben-Dor, Lakshmanan Iyer, Erich Baker, Winston Hide, Takis Benos
Recent Activity: survey bioinformatics core facility directors to regarding hiring practices

=======================
From: Welch, Lonnie
Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2011 10:56 PM
To: 'Fran Lewitter'; education
Subject: RE: ISCB Education Committee initiatives and minutes from 7/17/11 meeting

Dear Members of the ISCB Education Committee,

I would like to invite your participation in our committee's task force on curriculum.

During spring and summer of 2011, we constructed a straw man curriculum that is based on a survey of our committee and of the EMBnet community. The result of this effort is being written up in a report for the ISCB column in PLoS Computational Biology.

We plan to refine the curriculum via the following tasks:
1. Survey job opportunities (led by Lonnie Welch)
2. Survey existing curricula (led by Russell Schwartz)
3. Survey perspectives of Directors of Bioinformatics Core Facilities and biological researchers (led by Fran Lewitter)

We plan to perform the surveys during fall 2011 and to incorporate our findings into the EduComm bioinformatics curriculum during winter 2012.

Please let us know if you would like to be involved in this effort. In your reply, specify which of the 3 tasks interest you (feel free to select as many of the 3 as you wish).

Best regards,
Lonnie Welch
--
Lonnie R. Welch, Stuckey Professor
Director of the Bioinformatics Laboratory
School of Elec. Eng. & Computer Science,
Biomedical Engineering Program,
Molecular and Cellular Biology Program
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701
740-593-1575 (office); 740-818-9521 (mobile)
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
www.ohio.edu/cidds/welch/

ISMB 2012 Registration Now Open and Last call for SCS8 Abstracts

Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,

We invite you to register now for the 20th Anniversary ISMB conference being held July 15-17, 2012, in Long Beach, California. The link below will take you to a page full of details, including options, pricing, and early registration discount deadline, as well as to the online registration form itself.

ISMB 2012 Registration

Additionally, these final opportunities still exist for the possibility of presenting your work at the conference:

Student Council Symposium - deadline April 2nd

Technology Track - deadline April 20th

Late Posters - deadline April 20th

The 8th annual Student Council Symposium is a student-organized event featuring keynote lectures, oral presentations and a poster session tailored to undergraduate and graduate students as well as post-docs in computational biology and related disciplines. SCS presenters are eligible to apply for special Travel Fellowship funding secured and awarded by the Student Council.

The Technology Track provides organizations the opportunity to showcase their software and/or hardware relevant to the bioinformatics/molecular biology community. Submissions selected for presentation are required to pay a Tech Track fee and will be given a 25- or 50-minute time slot based on their status as a non- or for-profit organization.

Late Posters will be displayed and scheduled for presentation within the regular poster sessions of the conference. All posters are intended to convey a scientific result in any area of computational biology, and must include original work that is unpublished or published after August 1, 2011. While purely experimental work is especially encouraged, advertisements for commercial software packages are prohibited.

The ISMB 2012 conference agenda is currently taking shape, and you can visit the Schedule Overview in order to begin organizing your travel plans. The Program page of the site includes links to details about the conference tracks and sessions, and is being updated regularly as decisions are made on acceptances from submissions to the various tracks. And finally, the General Info page includes links to helpful information such as housing, tourist info, and the availability of child/dependent care to ensure your conference experience is both successful and enjoyable.

The ISMB 2012 Conference Co-Chairs and every member of the Scientific Organizing Committee look forward to welcoming you to Long Beach soon!

Sincerely,

ISMB 2012 Conference Co-Chairs:
Terry Gaasterland, University of California, San Diego, United States
Richard Lathrop, University of California, Irvine, United States
Burkhard Rost, Technical University Munich, Germany

Last Call for ISCB Board of Directors Nominations

Board Nominations Deadline: April 6, 2012

Also in progress: ISCB Officer and Student Council Leader Nominations - deadline June 3, 2012

As a reminder, the International Society for Computational Biology is encouraging members to submit nominations for the Society's Board of Directors; the Officer positions of Vice President, Treasurer, and Secretary; and the Student Council Leadership positions of Chair, Vice-Chair, Secretary, Treasurer, and SC Rep to the ISCB Board. Nominations are submitted at www.iscb.org/nominate (you must login to your membership record to access the nomination form). In all cases, self nominations will not be accepted.

If you know of excellent candidates that meet the eligibility requirements below, please be sure to submit your nomination(s) right away.

• In order to be eligible for candidacy as a Director a person must be or become an ISCB member in good standing no later than the date he or she accepts the nomination. Acceptance is then completed by submitting a candidate statement by May 4, 2012.
• All Director candidates must pledge to make every reasonable effort to attend the bi-monthly Board teleconference beginning with a training period in October 2012 and the annual in-person Board of Directors meeting (held at the ISMB conference) at their own expense through completion of the three-year term that begins January 21, 2013.
• In order to be eligible to be an Officer candidate a person must have served on the ISCB Board of Directors for at least one year prior to January 2013, and be an ISCB member in good standing, or renew a lapsed membership no later than June 24, 2012.
• All Officer candidates must pledge to make every reasonable effort to attend the weekly Executive Committee teleconferences beginning with a training period by mid-October, 2012, the bi-monthly Board teleconferences beginning with a training period in October 2012, and the annual in-person Board of Directors meeting (held at the ISMB conference) at their own expense through completion of the two-year Officer term that begins January 21, 2013.
• The elected Officers will also serve concurrently on the Board of Directors for a term that ends January 21, 2016.
  

Nominations for Board of Directors will be accepted through April 6, 2012. Election of Board members will take place during the annual ISCB Board of Directors meeting in July 2012.

Nominations for Officers and Student Council Leaders will be accepted through June 3, 2012. Election of the Officers and Student Council Leaders will take place via online voting by the membership in July, 2012, including availability to a dedicated voting booth at the ISMB conference.

Each nomination requires the name, affiliation, and email address of the nominee, along with an assurance that the nominee meets the qualifications and is willing to stand for election for the position in question. The nomination must also include a few sentences of justification that makes the strongest case possible for the nominee.

Full information regarding the 2012 nominations/elections timeline, call for nominations, and Director and Officer responsibilities can be found at www.iscb.org/iscb-leadership-a-staff-/officers-and-board-directors/nomination-election-procedures.

We are looking forward to an active participation by the ISCB membership in the nominations and election process, and we thank you in advance for your qualified nominations.

Respectfully,

Dietlind Gerloff, Scott Markel, and Anna Tramontano
Co-Chairs, ISCB Nominations Committee