This year, the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference—the annual meeting of the International Society for Computational Biology—joined with the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) in Stockholm, Sweden, bringing together computer scientists, molecular biologists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and statisticians from around the world. Together, they brainstormed and discussed how to develop and apply computational methods to biological problems.
At the conference, Wiley-Blackwell made a strong showing. UCSD Professor Philip Bourne, co-editor of Structural Bioinformatics, Second Edition (Wiley-Blackwell, April 2009) presented a talk about the need for a unique identifier for researchers, similar to the DOI used to identify articles.
Senior Publisher for Wiley-Blackwell Bob Campbell followed up on the topic of developing “DOIs for researchers” in conjunction with his involvement with Crossref, an association aimed at improving infrastructure within scholarly publishing. Developing unique identifiers for researchers is one of the association’s objectives, along with CrossMark: a symbol intended to denote the publisher’s version of an article from amongst the many other versions that may appear on the web.
Wiley’s third presenter was CPCB author Erik Sonnhammer, who organized a special session highlighting the need to identify orthologs—the single genes that are responsible for one species diverging and that are, therefore, identical in those species’ last common ancestor—between all organisms that have been completely sequenced.
For more information about sessions and presenters, visit the ISMB/ECCB 2009 Conference website.
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