Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Aggregating and integrating OA info

Gary Bader, Open Access and Open Source Speed Computational Network Biology Research, University of Toronto Project Open Source | Open Access, April 9, 2007.  Excerpt:

Imagine you are confronted one day by a pile of hundreds of tiny metal gears, springs, screws and such. Could you tell by looking at that pile that you could assemble a Swiss watch from it? Now imagine that you are given a list of parts for a person and want to know how an estimated 25-100 trillion cells in the human body function over a lifetime....

We are at this stage right now in biology. The human genome project has provided us with a large number of parts, but we don’t know they fit together, how the biomolecules interact....

A major challenge for studying the cellular network is collecting all known public information from very diverse sources, such as the biomedical literature, raw experimental data and the hundreds of existing pathway databases. Open access content and open source software systems are critical for overcoming this challenge. Once information is freely shared in open, standard formats, it can be aggregated, integrated, searched, visualized and analyzed. The Bader lab is involved in a number of open access projects that together work towards this goal....