Letter of support to keep NCBO going!

[Michel Dumontier]

Hi all,
The NCBO team is looking to for continued support to operate
BioPortal and related services. Given the importance of having access
to the latest bio-ontologies, I kindly ask you to consider sending
Mark Musen an email, or better, a signed letter indicating how you use
NCBO services in your projects. Having each of you contribute in this
way sends a powerful message that these resources are high priority
and need continued support. Check out the email from Mark below, and
send him your testimonial in the next week or so!

Thanks in advance!

m.

Michel Dumontier
Associate Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics), Stanford University
Chair, W3C Semantic Web for Health Care and the Life Sciences Interest Group
http://dumontierlab.com



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark Musen <mu...@stanford.edu>
Date: Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 6:32 PM
Subject: [ncbo-publictalks] Letter of support to keep NCBO going!
To: bioontolo...@lists.stanford.edu,
bioportal...@lists.stanford.edu,
ncbo-pub...@lists.stanford.edu


Friends,

I apologize for the cross-postings, but this message is very
important. As most of you know, the National Center for Biomedical
Ontology (NCBO) is a National Center for Biomedical Computing (NCBC)
supported under a special grant program of the National Institutes of
Health. The NIH envisioned the NCBC program as a 10-year initiative
to create national infrastructure for biomedical computing. Alas, the
10 years of funding that have allowed us to create tools such as
BioPortal, the NCBO Annotator, the NCBO Resource Index, and many other
widely used technologies will be coming to an end in the coming year.

The NCBO team is in the process of seeking new funding to continue our
work to provide scalable services in support of semantic technology
for use in biomedicine. This funding will allow us to retain much of
our engineering team and to engage with our user community. For those
of you have have benefitted from the NCBO and the resources that it
offers, we would be extremely grateful if you could help us to secure
ongoing funding so that you can continue to receive these benefits.

I am asking for something very simple: A letter of support that we
can include in our grant application.

When our request for new grant funding will be reviewed by the NIH,
the testimonials that we receive from our user community will have a
major role in determining whether we will receive future funding and,
if so, whether we will be supported at the level that we request in
our proposal. Letters from major projects that rely on NCBO
technology will go a long way to ensuring uninterrupted user support
and many exciting new features in the years ahead.

It would be best if you could send me a letter on letterhead (either
hardcopy or PDF) that I can include in the grant application. Sending
me e-mail is fine, but a letter on formal letterhead with a real
signature will have more impact. If you send e-mail, please do not
quote this request in your reply.

Every letter should provide a brief description of the project or
projects for which you rely on NCBO services. If a project is the
result of federally sponsored research, please include a reference to
the agency that is funding the work and the corresponding grant or
contract number. Grant numbers are particularly important to the NIH.

Although there is no required format for your letter, it would be
wonderful if you could comment on the following kinds of things:

* How are you using NCBO resources? Please describe the project or
projects with which you are using our services.

* If the availability of the NCBO and its technologies is important to
you, please comment on why this is the case.

* Overall, how has the NCBO made a difference to you and your work?

Formal letters are best but, if it is impractical to write a letter, a
brief e-mail message will be greatly appreciated. Fundamentally, the
continued existence of the NCBO depends on our ability to demonstrate
the importance of our work to the community that we support.

I know that this request imposes on your time, and the entire NCBO
team will be grateful for any statement of support that we can include
in our grant application. One of the most exciting aspects of our
project has been the ability to serve and support a user community
that believes in our work and what we are trying to do. All of us who
work at the NCBO are grateful to all of you who have contributed your
support and your suggestions to the project.

Please send your letters to me at the address below by January 23, 2015.

Many thanks,

Mark


-----------------------------------------------
Mark A. Musen, M.D., Ph.D.
Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics)
Principal Investigator, the National Center for Biomedical Ontology
Director, Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research
Stanford University
1265 Welch Road, Room X-215
Stanford, CA 94305 USA

Phone: +1 (650) 725-3390
Fax: +1 (650) 725-7944

mu...@Stanford.EDU

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