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

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

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Renowned scientific computing expert to speak at international life sciences conference on Semantic Web and Big Data in Cambridge, MA

LA JOLLA, CA – Pioneering scientist and best selling author Stephen Wolfram will deliver a keynote talk at next week’s Conference on Semantics in Healthcare and Life Sciences (CSHALS) in Cambridge, MA.

Wolfram is an internationally recognized authority on complex systems and knowledge base computing. His work in the early and mid-1980s focused on understanding complex systems and resulted in discovering important connections between computation and nature. He is the chief designer of the Mathematica technical computing software on workflow applications, and author of the bestseller "A New Kind of Science," first released in 2002 and now freely available online. As president and CEO of Wolfram Research, he launched the Wolfram|Alpha Central Knowledge Engine in 2009 that aims to use computational tools to make the world’s knowledge base accessible to all. His research and software developments continually tackle the specific challenges being addressed by researchers attending the CSHALS meeting: The Semantic Web that promotes common formats for all data on the Web; and Big Data that seeks to manage datasets that have grown too large to work with using common tools and applications.

Wolfram’s keynote is part of a roster of keynote presentations throughout the CSHALS conference from noted scientists, including: knowledge representation and reasoning specialist Rinke Hoekstra of the University of Amsterdam, informatics program director Isaac (Zak) Kohane of Harvard Medical School’s Children’s Hospital, biologist and bioinformatics specialist Barend Mons of the University of Rotterdam and the Leiden University Medical Centre in The Netherlands, and research specialist Chris Welty of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. The conference also features 18 presentations from other invited speakers and those selected through peer reviewed abstract submissions.

About CSHALS
Now in its fifth year, CSHALS, an annual conference of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), is the premier annual event focused on the use of semantic technologies in the pharmaceutical industry, including hospitals/healthcare institutions and academic research labs. This year’s gathering will be held February 23-24 at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and includes a pre-conference tutorial and scientific posterreception on February 22nd. For more information visit the conference website at www.iscb.org/cshals2012.

About ISCB
The International Society for Computational Biology is a nonprofit scholarly society dedicated to advancing the scientific understanding of living systems through computation. Based in La Jolla, California, at the San Diego Supercomputer Center on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, the ISCB has a global membership of 3,000 researchers from 70 countries. For more information, visit www.iscb.org.

Press Contact
BJ Morrison McKay
ISCB Executive Officer
+1-760-522-8805
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ISCB Releases 2011 Accomplishments Report

Click here to download the ISCB 2011 Accomplishments report (.pdf)

January 10, 2012

Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,

As many of you may be aware, the U.S. House of Representatives has recently been presented with a bill called the Research Works Act (HR 3699) that threatens the current U.S. requirements of public access to federally funded research results. ISCB strongly opposes this bill. Burkhard Rost, ISCB President, and Richard Lathrop, ISCB Public Affairs & Policies Committee Chair, are drafting a letter to the bill's authors that expresses our opposition and emphasizes the importance of the ISCB Public Policy Statement on Open Access to Scientific and Technical Research Literature that was released in 2010.

If you are a member of ISCB and have not yet signed on to our statement, you are invited to do so at your earliest opportunity 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, and the ISCB Board of Directors

Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,

The Conference on Semantics in Healthcare and Life Sciences is less than two weeks away, happening February 23nd and 24th at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, MA, USA! Don't miss this opportunity to attend the premier annual event focused on the use of semantic technologies in the pharmaceutical/healthcare industry - now also covering "Big Data."

>> ONLINE REGISTRATION <<

ISCB Member Discounts Apply

NEWS FLASH: If you feel the need to increase your proficiency in the conference topics before investing additional time and money in the full conference registration, you now have the opportunity to register for only the CSHALS Tutorial being presented by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Tetherless World Constellation on February 22nd.

If you decide after attending the Tutorial to also register for the main conference, 50% of your tutorial fee will be applied toward your on-site conference registration fee. This special Tutorial-only registration offer must be completed by Monday, February 20th (5:00 pm Eastern).

CSHALS 2012 will feature keynote lectures, invited talks, and selected oral presentations and posters on the role of the semantic web of linked data to orchestrate cloud based resources, from drug development and Biomedical research to personalized health care. Attendees will walk away with a better understanding of semantics-based approaches and challenges currently faced throughout our industry.

If you have not attended a previous CSHALS and want a sneak peak at how the content might apply to your research, we invite you to view the free Webinar presentation that was given last September to reprise and update Larry Hunter's CSHALS 2011 Keynote Presentation.

Please be sure to forward this mail to all of your colleagues and collaborators who might benefit from attending CSHALS. We thank you for helping us spread the word, and look forward to your participation!

Sincerely,
Your CSHALS 2012 Organizing Committee:

Conference Chairs

• Mike Bevil, Merck & Co.
• Joanne Luciano, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Tetherless World Constellation

Committee Members

• Jonas S. Almeida, University of Alabama at Birmingham
• Lee Feigenbaum, Cambridge Semantics
• Ted Slater, Broad Reach Strategic Advising LLC, Past Conference Chair

Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,

The call to submit a proposal to conduct a Workshop at ISMB 2012 is still open.  This 20th anniversary conference will be held July 15-17 in Long Beach, California.

Workshop Proposals - deadline March 10, 2012

The above link will take you to the full details and guidelines about ISMB Workshops. From there you can also access the submission system to submit your proposal today.

Workshops cover a broad range of non-research-oriented topics that address issues important to bioinformatics researchers and educators. Preference will be given to topics of wide interest to attendees, with a planned agenda that is not primarily made up of research paper presentations. Examples of previous workshops are: Bioinformatics Core Facilities; Education in Bioinformatics; and Navigating the Granting Jungle. Additional topics of particular interest to the ISMB community or those sponsored by ISCB committees are welcome.

Each workshops is scheduled to run for two hours following the same schedule as all other parallel tracks of the ISMB conference. This allows for segmenting the workshop into four 25-minute presentation/discussion periods (including participant questions and answers) followed by a required 5 minute synchronized break for movement between ISMB parallel tracks. Workshops can include multiple talks, panel discussions, and ample participant discussion time.

Several additional opportunities exist for presentation at the conference, including Highlights of previous publications, 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 at ISMB 2012.

Registration will open next month. 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,
Christine Orengo, Workshops Chair, ISMB 2012

Dear ISCB Members, Colleagues, and Past GLBIO Attendees,

We invite you to participate in the The Great Lakes Bioinformatics Conference, taking place in Ann Arbor, Michigan this coming May.

CALL FOR POSTER PRESENTATIONS CLOSES IN JUST ONE MONTH!

Poster Information & Abstract Submission Form Deadline: Mar 15, 2012

EARLY REGISTRATION CLOSES IN JUST TWO MONTHS:

Online Registration Information and Form Early Registration Deadline: April 15, 2012

GLBIO topic areas include Algorithm Development and Machine Learning, Bioimaging, Databases and Ontologies, Disease Models and Epidemiology, Evolution and Comparative Genomics, Gene Regulation and Transcriptomics, Metagenomics, Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics, Population Genomics, Protein Interactions and Molecular Networks, Protein Structure and Function, Sequence Analysis, and Text Mining.

This year's keynote presentations will cover a broad range of interesting topics. Keynote Speakers for 2012 are: Howard Cash of Gene Codes, Michael Lynch of Indiana University, Mercedes Pascual of the University of Michigan, and Russell Schwartz of Carnegie Mellon University.

We look forward to receiving your submission before the deadline, and to welcoming you to Ann Arbor in May!

Sincerely,

Your GLBIO 2012 Steering/Organizing Committee

Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,

The ISCB Latin America 2012 conference is making available one last opportunity to present your research at the conference, with a Call for Late Posters that is open for just the next three days.

>> Call for Late Poster Submissions - Just Three Days to Submit! <<

Late Poster Presentation submission deadline: February 7, 2012

(Please note that late poster presenters are not eligible for travel fellowship funding.)

The conference will be preceded by tutorials on March 17 and 18; the main conference takes place on March 19-21; a full day of post-conference workshops and round table discussions happens on March 22. It all takes place at one of Latin America's most prestigious universities, the Universidad Católica de Chile (Catholic University of Chile), located in the heart of vibrant Santiago.

>> Click Here to go Directly to Registration Information <<

Early registration deadline: February 10, 2012

Researchers from all countries of the world are welcome and encouraged to attend, and registrations received to-date have come from Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. If yours is not among them we encourage you to consider making plans to attend today, and submitting your late poster within the next 72 hours. This meeting will provide a forum for rich international exchange and collaboration. Students and post docs can expect to be deeply motivated and inspired to pursue and perform the best research possible in their chosen interest areas, while established and senior researchers will find unique opportunities to interact with peers and to influence the careers of our next generation of researchers. All attendees will be intellectually stimulated by our exceptional line up of international and regional keynote speakers.

The main conference features five international keynote speakers:

• Dr. Peer Bork, EMBL-Heidelberg, Germany

• Dr. Alessandro Sette, La Jolla Institute for Immunology and Allergy, USA
  

• Dr. Manfred Sippl, University of Salzburg, Austria
  

• Dr. Yves van de Peer, Ghent University, Belgium
  

• Dr. Aleksey Zimin, University of Maryland, USA
  

In addition, seven highly accomplished keynote speakers from the Latin America region will also deliver talks at the conference. The full list of keynote talks can be found HERE.

Networking opportunities include poster session receptions, a conference banquet, and casual evenings spent exploring the vast and vibrant city of Santiago together with old and new friends and colleagues.

SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT TUTORIAL REGISTRATIONS: An impressive selection of practical tutorials and hands-on workshops will be presented by some of the most well-known research groups in the world. Registration is limited to the capacity of each tutorial room, and will be accepted in the order in which the registrations are received until capacity is reached. We expect all tutorials to sell-out, and recommend early registration to ensure your tutorial preference can be accepted.

Please forward this mail to colleagues and collaborators you feel might be interested or should attend ISCB Latin America 2012. Sponsorship opportunities are also still available and all inquiries are welcome at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Submit your late poster abstract and register for the conference and tutorials now to take advantage of this final opportunity to present your work and save with the early discount while it lasts. We hope to see you in Santiago next month!

Sincerely,

The ISCB Latin America 2012 Organizing Committees

Call for ISCB Fellows Nominations: deadline April 30th

Dear ISCB Member,

Nominations for the 2012 ISCB Class of Fellows is now open. If you know of a member that you believe has earned his or her place among ISCB's Fellows through exceptional and exemplary contributions to the field of computational biology/bioinformatics, please nominate today. Since 2009 the leadership of the International Society for Computational Biology has been honoring our most distinctive members as Fellows, and this is your chance to name our 2012 Class of Fellows.

Information about the ISCB Fellows program, nomination requirements, and selection criteria can be found at www.iscb.org/iscb-fellows

The nomination form is available at www.iscb.org/fellow-nomination (as only members can nominate, login is required; if you are not a current member please join today!).

The nomination deadline is April 30, 2012.

Thank you for your considerate nomination!

Sincerely,
Alfonso Valencia, Chair, ISCB Fellows Committee