Announcing the PLoS Text Mining Collection

https://twitter.com/#!/Theo_Bloom/status/157091460041285632

Based on a spur of the moment tweet earlier this year, and a positive follow up from Theo Bloom, I’m very happy to announce that PLoS has now put the wheels in motion to develop a Collection of articles that highlight the importance of Text Mining research. The Call for Papers has just been announced today, and I’m very excited to see this effort highlight the synergy between Open Access, Altmetrics and Text Mining research. I’m particularly keen to see someone take the reigns on writing a good description of the API for PLoS (and other publishers). And a good lesson to all to be careful to watch what you tweet!

The Call for Paper below is cross posted at the PLoS Blog

Call for Papers: PLoS Text Mining Collection

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) seeks submissions in the broad field of text-mining research for a collection to be launched across all of its journals in 2013. All submissions submitted before October 30th, 2012 will be considered for the launch of the collection. Please read the following post for further information on how to submit your article.

The scientific literature is exponentially increasing in size, with thousands of new papers published every day. Few researchers are able to keep track of all new publications, even in their own field, reducing the quality of scholarship and leading to undesirable outcomes like redundant publication. While social media and expert recommendation systems provide partial solutions to the problem of keeping up with the literature, systematically identifying relevant articles and extracting key information from them can only come through automated text-mining technologies.

Research in text mining has made incredible advances over the last decade, driven through community challenges and increasingly sophisticated computational technologies. However, the promise of text mining to accelerate and enhance research largely has not yet been fulfilled, primarily since the vast majority of the published scientific literature is not published under an Open Access model. As Open Access publishing yields an ever-growing archive of unrestricted full-text articles, text mining will play an increasingly important role in drilling down to essential research and data in scientific literature in the 21st century scholarly landscape.

As part of its commitment to realizing the maximal utility of Open Access literature, PLoS is launching a collection of articles dedicated to highlighting the importance of research in the area of text mining. The launch of this Text Mining Collection complements related PLoS Collections on Open Access and Altmetrics (forthcoming), as well as the recent release of the PLoS Application Programming Interface, which provides an open API to PLoS journal content.

As part of this Text Mining Collection, we are making a call for high quality submissions that advance the field of text-mining research, including:

• New methods for the retrieval or extraction of published scientific facts
• Large-scale analysis of data extracted from the scientific literature
• New interfaces for accessing the scientific literature
• Semantic enrichment of scientific articles
• Linking the literature to scientific databases
• Application of text mining to database curation
• Approaches for integrating text mining into workflows
• Resources (ontologies, corpora) to improve text mining research

Please note that all submissions submitted before October 30th, 2012 will be considered for the launch of the collection (expected early 2013); submissions after this date will still be considered for the collection, but may not appear in the collection at launch.

Submission Guidelines
If you wish to submit your research to the PLoS Text Mining Collection, please consider the following when preparing your manuscript:

All articles must adhere to the submission guidelines of the PLoS journal to which you submit.
Standard PLoS policies and relevant publication fees apply to all submissions.
Submission to any PLoS journal as part of the Text Mining Collection does not guarantee publication.

When you are ready to submit your manuscript to the collection, please log in to the relevant PLoS manuscript submission system and mention the Collection’s name in your cover letter. This will ensure that the staff is aware of your submission to the Collection. The submission systems can be found on the individual journal websites.

Please contact Samuel Moore (smoore@plos.org) if you would like further information about how to submit your research to the PLoS Text Mining Collection.

Organizers
Casey Bergman (University of Manchester)
Lawrence Hunter (University of Colorado-Denver)
Andrey Rzhetsky (University of Chicago)

 

Will the Democratization of Sequencing Undermine Openness in Genomics?

It is no secret, nor is it an accident, that the success of genome biology over the last two decades owes itself in large part to the Open Science ideals and practices that underpinned the Human Genome Project. From the development of the Bermuda principles in 1996 to the Ft. Lauderdale agreement in 2003, leaders in the genomics community fought for rapid, pre-publication data release policies that have (for the most part) protected the interests of genome sequencing centers and the research community alike.

As a consequence, progress in genomic data acquisition and analysis has been incredibly fast, leading to major basic and medical breakthroughs, thousands of publications, and ultimately to new technologies that now permit extremely high-throughput DNA sequencing. These new sequencing technologies now give individual groups sequencing capabilities that were previously only acheivable by large sequencing centers. This development makes it timely to ask: how do the data release policies for primary genome sequences apply in the era of next-generation sequencing (NGS)?

My reading of the the history of genome sequence release policies condenses the key issues as follows:

• The Bermuda Principles say that assemblies of primary genomic sequences of human and other organims should be made within 24 hrs of their production
• The Ft. Lauderdale Agreement says that whole genome shotgun reads should be deposited in public repositories within one week of generation. (This agreement was also encouraged to be applied to other types of data from “community resource projects” – defined as research project specifically devised and implemented to create a set of data, reagents or other material whose primary utility will be as a resource for the broad scientific community.)

Thus, the agreed standard in the genomics field is that raw sequence data from the primary genomic sequence of organisms should be made available within a week of generation. In my view this also applies to so-called “resequencing” efforts (like the 1000 Genomes Project), since genomic data from a new strain or individual is actually a new primary genome sequence.

The key question concerning genomic data release policies in the NGS era, then, is do these data release policies apply only to sequencing centers or to any group producing primary genomic data? Now that you are a sequencing center, are you also bound by the obligations that sequencing centers have followed for a decade or more? This is an important issue to discuss for it’s own sake in order to promote Open Science, but also for the conundrums it throws up about data release policies in genomics. For example, if individual groups who are sequencing genomes are not bound by the same data release policies as sequencing centers, then a group at e.g. Sanger or Baylor working on a genome is actually now put at a competetive disadvantage in the NGS era because they would be forced to release their data.

I argue that if the wider research community does not abide by the current practices of early data release in genomics, the democratization of sequencing will lead to the slow death of openness in genomics. We could very well see a regression to the mean behavior of data hording (I sometimes call this “data mine, mine, mining”) that is sadly characteristic of most of biological sciences. In turn this could decelerate progress in genomics, leading to a backlog of terabytes of un(der)analyzed data rotting on disks around the world. Are you prepared to standby, do nothing and bear witness to this bleak future? ; )

While many individual groups collecting primary genomic sequence data may hesitate to embrace the idea of pre-publication data release, it should be noted that there is also a standard procedure in place for protecting the interests of the data producer to have first chance to publish (or co-publish) large-scale analysis of the data, while permitting the wider research community to have early access. The Ft. Lauderdale agreeement recognized that:

…very early data release model could potentially jeopardize the standard scientific practice that the investigators who generate primary data should have both the right and responsibility to publish the work in a peer-reviewed journal. Therefore, NHGRI agreed to the inclusion of a statement on the sequence trace data permitting the scientific community to use these unpublished data for all purposes, with the sole exception of publication of the results of a complete genome sequence assembly or other large-scale analyses in advance of the sequence producer’s initial publication.

This type of data producer protection proviso has being taken up by some community-led efforts to release large amounts of primary sequence data prior to publiction, as laudably done by the Drosophila Population Genomics Project (Thanks Chuck!)

While the Ft. Lauderdale agreement in principle tries to balance the interests of the data producers and consumers, it is not without failings. As Mike Eisen points out on his blog:

In practice [the Ft. Lauderdale privoso] has also given data producers the power to create enormous consortia to analyze data they produce, effectively giving them disproportionate credit for the work of large communities. It’s a horrible policy that has significantly squelched the development of a robust genome analysis community that is independent of the big sequencing centers.

Eisen rejects the Ft. Lauderdale agreement in favor of a new policy he entitles The Batavia Open Genomic Data Licence.  The Batavia License does not require an embargo period or the need to inform data producers of how they intend to use the data, as is expected under the Ft. Lauderdale agreement, but it requires that groups using the data publish in an open access journal. Therefore the Batavia License is not truly open either, and I fear that it imposes unnecessary restrictions that will prevent its widespread uptake. The only truly Open Science policy for data release is a Creative Commons (CC-BY or CC-Zero) style license that has no restrictions other than attribution, a precedent that was established last year for the E. coli TY-2482 genome sequence (BGI you rock!).

A CC-style license will likely be too liberal for most labs generating their own data, and thus I argue we may be better off pushing for a individual groups to use a Ft. Lauderdale style agreement to encourage the (admittedly less than optimal) status quo to be taken up by the wider community. Another option is for researchers to release their data early via “data publications” such as those being developed by journals such as GigaScience and F1000 Reports.

Whatever the mechanism, I join with Eisen in calling for wider participation for the research to community to release their primary genomic sequence data. Indeed, it would be a truly sad twist of fate if the wider research community does not follow the genomic data release policies in the post-NGS era that were put in place in the pre-NGS era in order to protect their interests. I for one will do my best in the coming years to reciprocate the generosity that has made Drosophila genomics community so great (in the long tradition of openness dating back to the Morgan school), by releasing any primary sequence data produced by my lab prior to publication. Watch this space.