Molecular Biology Data Society
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| Molecular Biology Data Society | |
|---|---|
| Name | Molecular Biology Data Society |
| Formation | 2010s |
| Type | Professional association |
| Headquarters | New York City |
| Leader title | President |
| Leader name | Jane Doe |
Molecular Biology Data Society is a professional association that advocates for standards, stewardship, and sharing of life sciences datasets within computational and experimental communities. It convenes researchers, librarians, curators, funders, and policy makers to address data interoperability, reproducibility, and infrastructure across biological domains. The Society engages with academic, industrial, and governmental stakeholders to promote best practices in data management and to influence funding and regulatory frameworks.
History
The Society traces its origins to meetings and working groups that included participants from National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, and Wellcome Trust convened after high-profile reproducibility discussions at conferences such as Genome Informatics Workshop, International Society for Computational Biology events, and workshops hosted by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Early conveners included leaders affiliated with Broad Institute, Whitehead Institute, European Bioinformatics Institute, and Sanger Institute, who collaborated with representatives from Library of Congress, National Library of Medicine, and the DataCite community. Founding activities were influenced by initiatives like FAIR data principles, discussions at World Health Organization technical panels, and standards development underway at Research Data Alliance and Global Alliance for Genomics and Health.
Mission and Objectives
The Society's mission emphasizes stewardship of molecular and genomic data for reuse by stakeholders including investigators at Harvard University, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and University of Cambridge. Objectives include developing standards compatible with efforts by GenBank, European Nucleotide Archive, Protein Data Bank, and ontology projects such as Gene Ontology and Sequence Ontology; advocating for funding mechanisms used by Wellcome Trust and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and coordinating with policy frameworks from Office of Science and Technology Policy and regulatory agencies like Food and Drug Administration. The Society supports training programs modeled on workshops at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, curricula from Carnegie Mellon University, and data carpentry initiatives associated with Software Carpentry.
Governance and Membership
Governance is grounded in a board modeled after organizations such as American Society for Microbiology, Association for Computing Machinery, and International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories. The Society's membership includes researchers from institutions like Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Oxford; data curators from National Center for Biotechnology Information; and industry representatives from companies such as Illumina, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Google, and Microsoft Research. Committees echo structures used by National Academy of Sciences panels and liaise with standards bodies including ISO and World Wide Web Consortium. Membership categories mirror those used by Society for Neuroscience and American Association for the Advancement of Science, offering student, professional, and institutional tiers.
Conferences and Meetings
The Society organizes annual conferences that draw participants from meetings such as RECOMB, Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, American Society for Cell Biology annual meetings, and satellite sessions at ISMB. Program tracks have featured speakers from European Molecular Biology Organization, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Kaiser Permanente, and representatives of data infrastructures like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Workshops address topics prominent at Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, ENAR, and Gordon Research Conferences, and often co-locate with events run by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Wellcome Genome Campus.
Publications and Resources
The Society curates resources and publishes guidance inspired by outlets such as Nature, Science, PLOS Computational Biology, and Bioinformatics (journal). White papers echo formats used by National Academies Press and policy briefs from RAND Corporation. Technical recommendations reference standards from MIAME, metadata schemas used by Dublin Core, and identifiers propagated by Digital Object Identifier and ORCID. Training materials adopt pedagogical approaches from edX courses and workshops affiliated with ELIXIR and Galaxy (software).
Collaborations and Partnerships
Collaborations span partnerships with infrastructure providers like European Bioinformatics Institute, National Center for Biotechnology Information, and cloud partners such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. The Society works with funders and consortia including Wellcome Trust, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Global Alliance for Genomics and Health to align policy and technical standards. It engages with standards organizations such as Research Data Alliance, World Wide Web Consortium, and International Organization for Standardization to harmonize metadata and exchange formats, and collaborates with initiatives at ELIXIR, Genomics England, and Human Cell Atlas to support interoperable datasets.