APICURON: a database to credit and acknowledge the work of biocurators.

András Hatos,Silvio C E Tosatto,Damiano Piovesan,Federica Quaglia

doi:10.1093/database/baab019

András Hatos, Silvio C E Tosatto + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1093/database/baab019

Copy DOI

Abstract

APICURON is an open and freely accessible resource that tracks and credits the work of biocurators across multiple participating knowledgebases. Biocuration is essential to extract knowledge from research data and make it available in a structured and standardized way to the scientific community. However, processing biological data—mainly from literature—requires a huge effort that is difficult to attribute and quantify. APICURON collects biocuration events from third-party resources and aggregates this information, spotlighting biocurator contributions. APICURON promotes biocurator engagement implementing gamification concepts like badges, medals and leaderboards and at the same time provides a monitoring service for registered resources and for biocurators themselves. APICURON adopts a data model that is flexible enough to represent and track the majority of biocuration activities. Biocurators are identified through their Open Researcher and Contributor ID. The definition of curation events, scoring systems and rules for assigning badges and medals are resource-specific and easily customizable. Registered resources can transfer curation activities on the fly through a secure and robust Application Programming Interface (API). Here, we show how simple and effective it is to connect a resource to APICURON, describing the DisProt database of intrinsically disordered proteins as a use case. We believe APICURON will provide biological knowledgebases with a service to recognize and credit the effort of their biocurators, monitor their activity and promote curator engagement. Database URL: https://apicuron.org

Highlights

Biocuration plays a key role in making research data available to the scientific community in a structured and standardized way
We describe the philosophy and technical solutions adopted by APICURON to track curation activities, implement gamification experience and manage data transfer with registered resources and organizations
APICURON serves as an external tracker of biocuration activities of each one of its partner resource, playing a crucial role in well-known and established databases and in smaller, newer manually curated resources and, behind a firewall, for non-academic institutions and research companies where biocuration is required with the aim of properly crediting the work of biocurators, raising awareness to the crucial role played by biocuration in scientific research and promoting good practices

Summary

Introduction

Biocuration plays a key role in making research data available to the scientific community in a structured and standardized way. APICURON provides support to member databases in the registration process for the definition of the achievements and to identify the best granularity of the curation activities to be tracked. APICURON is easy to connect with third-party databases, allowing small emerging databases to adopt best practices and save the cost of implementing the technology for tracking curators work and provides profile pages, which showcase biocurators’ contributions across multiple resources in a single view.

Results

Conclusion