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

[Robert Giessmann]

Dear fellow COMBINE people,

I reached out to you last year regarding our openTECR hackathon. There we started work which now led to our newest project -- we re-curate a database on thermodynamics of enzyme-catalyzed reactions, which is living at https://randr.nist.gov/ , but not in a very machine-friendly version.

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...)

We estimated that we need a total of 50 working hours to bring the data into a good shape, and possibly work further from this to bring it into excellent shape.

You can contribute with time blocks as little as 10 minutes, to help us finish the re-curation and get yourself into a publication (and eternal gratefulness). We finished 10% of the total curation in the last 4 days, so we will definitely bring this to the finish line.

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

You can read the manual with detailed explanation here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vu0S6aNTA0xo8yGulJwdtE8lWITPstZMd0N-h5mADYc/edit

The spreadsheet for doing the actual curation is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jLIxEXVzE2SAzIB0UxBfcFoHrzjzf9euB6ART2VDE8c/edit#gid=952025966 (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