Development of biocuration processes and guidelines for new data types or projects is a challenging task. Each project finds its way toward defining annotation standards and ensuring data consistency with varying degrees of planning and different tools to support and/or report on consistency. Further, this process may be data type specific even within the context of a single project. This article describes our experiences with eagle-i, a 2-year pilot project to develop a federated network of data repositories in which unpublished, unshared or otherwise ‘invisible’ scientific resources could be inventoried and made accessible to the scientific community. During the course of eagle-i development, the main challenges we experienced related to the difficulty of collecting and curating data while the system and the data model were simultaneously built, and a deficiency and diversity of data management strategies in the laboratories from which the source data was obtained. We discuss our approach to biocuration and the importance of improving information management strategies to the research process, specifically with regard to the inventorying and usage of research resources. Finally, we highlight the commonalities and differences between eagle-i and similar efforts with the hope that our lessons learned will assist other biocuration endeavors.Database URL: www.eagle-i.net

Over the years, health sciences librarians have been change agents, leading the charge on issues of importance to the profession and the communities we serve. From its founding in 1898 with the Exchange, the Medical Library Association (MLA) has been dedicated to improving access to health information. In 2003, the Board of Directors published a statement supporting open access to information generated from federally funded scientific and medical research and maintained that having access to timely, relevant, and accurate information is vital to the health of the nation and its education and research programs. At some financial risk, the association made the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) open access and published the entire archive of JMLA and its predecessor, the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, in PubMed Central. Nearly two decades later, the promise of open access and open science finally seems to be coming to fruition. In the 2020 Janet Doe Lecture, Chris Shaffer, AHIP, described the ways that MLA has led the profession, standing behind a shared vision and “walking the walk.” In challenging listeners to embrace open science, he affirmed that, as leaders in improving access to health sciences information since 1898, medical librarians must work in the open science arena to realize our vision “that quality information is essential for improved health.”

No abstract

Over the past 4 years, the authors have participated as members of the Mobilizing Computable Biomedical Knowledge Technical Infrastructure working group and focused on conceptualizing the infrastructure required to use computable biomedical knowledge. Here, we summarize our thoughts and lay the foundation for future work in the development of CBK infrastructure, including: explaining the difference between computable knowledge and data, and contextualizing the conversation with the Learning Health Systems and the FAIR principles. Specifically, we provide three guiding principles to advance the development of CBK infrastructure: (a) Promote interoperable systems for data and knowledge to be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. (b) Enable stable, trustworthy knowledge representations that are human and machine readable. (c) Computable knowledge resources should, when possible, be open. Standards supporting computable knowledge infrastructures must be open.