*** FungiDB / VEuPathDB renewal ***
corro...@us.es
Dear Colleagues,
We are writing to you as the group of people who organized signatures
for your respective scientific communities in support of VEuPathDB and
its bid for a further five years as provider of the “Eukaryotic
Pathogen, Host & Vector Bioinformatics Resource Center (BRC)”. We
recently asked about the status of this proposal from VEuPathDB PIs Mary
Ann McDowell and David Roos and learned that, despite an extremely
positive review from the Special Emphasis Study Section (it was rated as
overall “Outstanding” and received a score of 20, for those who know
the NIH system), NIAID is currently planning to not renew VEuPathDB’s funding and instead will go with another group, whose identity no one we’ve spoken to knows. The planned transition date is Sept. 15 of this year, after which VEuPathDB will no longer be supported. A
static version of all VEuPathDB databases will be provided to the new
BRC, who will presumably continue to keep this available for some period
of time but no new genomes or functional genomics data will be loaded,
some queries and functionality (such as the ability to analyze your own
data) may no longer be possible, and the VEuPathDB outreach team led by
Omar Harb will not be available to support the community moving forward.
Note that we are sharing this news with you, rather than it coming from
Mary Ann or David as Co-PIs, to preclude any suggestion that they are
trying to rally support out of pure self-interest. As fellow end-users,
we felt that it was crucial to alert all of you to this news as its
impact on all of us is likely to be enormous.
We, of course, respect the right of NIAID to make programmatic decisions on how best to support such research infrastructure. Indeed, while we are all enormously appreciative of all the effort the VEuPathDB team has put into building this crucial resource over the last 20+ years, we are, a priori, agnostic as to what group should provide such a resource going forward. What we are unequivocal about is that we all rely on this resource in ways that are hard to appreciate unless you are living it and, to the best of our knowledge, no end-users from the mycology, parasitology, or vector biology communities were consulted on the relative merits of the two (or, perhaps, more) applications submitted (the review panel, who to say it again were extremely positive, was nevertheless drawn entirely from the bioinformatics community of people who create and operate such databases, not people whose research relies on this resource). We do not know how the competing proposal(s) scored, but, regardless, we do not believe a final decision regarding a resource used by tens of thousands of investigators on a daily basis should be made without consultation with the community of users.
The recommendation to switch provider goes to NIAID Council at its next meeting (June 3). We
are preparing a letter to impress upon that group the enormity of this
proposed change, our strong disagreement with how the decision was made,
and to ask that a final decision be deferred until after there has been
considered input from representatives of the end-user community. We
leave it to you to decide how you want to communicate this news to your
communities and what actions you might want to take to convey any
concerns you might have, individually or collectively, to NIAID (e.g.,
NIAID Director Jeanne Marrazzo and/or Division of Microbiology and
Infectious Diseases Director Emily Erbelding). Note that to the
extent that any change might still be possible, after June 3 the
decision is likely to be irreversible and so any action you do want to
take needs to be in the coming days.
Sincerely – John Boothroyd, Arturo Casadevall, Anthony James, Dyann Wirth
NIH Program officers to write.
DMID Director Emily Erbelding <emily.e...@nih.gov>
NIAID Director Jeanne Marrazzo <jeanne....@nih.gov>
Please note that NIAID is *not* proposing to cut off bioinformatics support for, but rather to engage another group (we don’t know who) to provide these services. PIs, students, postdocs, and other users of these resources may wish to comment – in your own words please – on:
- specific ways in which services provided by VEuPathDB have helped to advance your personal research program and plans
- unique functionalities not typically provided by other bioinformatics resources, such as the ability to assess the evidence underlying annotations, capture expert knowledge from (and disseminate to) the community, integrate diverse data-types to develop and test hypotheses in silico, tools for analyzing your own data, etc
- your experience with support from the VEuPathDB outreach team
- concerns about the time and difficulty likely required to develop, implement, and get everyone up to speed on a new system