Invitation to join the re-curation of the NIST TECRDB, Phase 2; openTECR

[Robert Giessmann]

Dear fellow COMBINE people,

I wrote an email earlier this year, where I invited you to re-curate a database on thermodynamics of enzyme-catalyzed reactions. More background information on this database can be found below.

Phase 1 of our re-curation effort was a tremendous, and unexpected success: in just 30 days, we were joined by 12 incredibly motivated curators, who contributed a total of 60 hours, all voluntarily. I am still stunned and so grateful! In Phase 1, we compared numbers from a Google Docs spreadsheet to tables in PDF files.

Now it's time for Phase 2, where we are going through the metadata of the tables; not the numbers, but more text-based comparisons.

For this next step, we estimate a need of 16 working hours.

You can contribute with time blocks as little as 3 minutes, to help us finish the re-curation and get yourself into a publication (and eternal gratefulness).

You can read the manual with detailed explanation here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12ShYTE-Ss3HJ6nhTeL0XBnlyM5fkCstl55L1x9rxuCU/edit

The spreadsheet for doing the actual curation is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jLIxEXVzE2SAzIB0UxBfcFoHrzjzf9euB6ART2VDE8c/edit#gid=652907302 (also linked from the manual)

I hope the manual is somewhat self-explanatory, but please always reach out when in doubt, and/or use the commenting function!

Thanks so much in advance for your support! And hoping to hear from you soon with questions on the annotation. :)

Best,

   Robert

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Background information on the data:

There is a database on thermodynamics of enzyme-catalyzed reactions, which is living at https://randr.nist.gov/ , but not in a very machine-friendly version.

There is also a set of pdf files, which form the basis for the online database.

We compare data from the online version with the source-of-truth PDF version, and clean up all the errors we encounter. (We encountered some already, so yes, this makes sense, even if it seems strange at first...)

A peer-reviewed publication in the Nucleic Acid Research journal's database issue is planned, with submission in August.