ANISEED has now being running for more than 10 years, mostly supported by soft money.
As its scope and content is extending, the type of funding we have had access in the past is proving limiting, causing in particular a lag in curation time between the publication of a paper and its inclusion in the database. In spite of our efforts we can hardly keep up with the Ciona molecular literature (~30 articles/year), and are not making significant progress on the Botryllus and Halocynthia literature.
As discussed in the ITM9 meeting last summer, we would like to encourage individual labs to freely contribute to the funding of the curation/maintenance work, in addition to general maintenance of the system and new tool development.
As a guideline, the salary for a software developer in France is 40k€, and on average the cost of curating an article (with 46 experiments) is 450€. There are currently about 50 ascidian labs in the community. If we could collectively raise 50k€/year, in addition to the current funding, this would immensely help keep ANISEED up to date with the literature on several species.
Here we are talking of a voluntary community-oriented contribution: the ANISEED data will stay entirely public to every one, and we are not planning to introduce a “premium” version for those contributing. This would be counterproductive. The aim is simply that those of us who can afford to support ANISEED do, for the benefit of all and increased visibility of our field of research.
Your contributions will be managed by Bioself Communication,
and will allow hiring part-time undergraduates to help improve the Aniseed system and to curate individual papers. Our experience is that this ensures a high level of curation, while providing training in both developmental biology and biocuration, a poorly taught subject in universities. These undergraduates do not need to be located in France. They could be based in your labs, as Delphine manages her crew through Skype.
If you want to contribute, the first step is to inform Delphine of the amount of your contribution (Suggestion: 1000 euros may be possible for most labs and would make a real difference). Delphine will send back a quote, informing you of what this contribution will allow her to do. If you agree to this, you will send a purchase order, and get an invoice in return, which you can charge to your grants. The precise format of the purchase order and invoice may depend on your source of funding or country of residence. This can be repeated as frequently as you wish… (e. g. at the end of the year when left-over money has traditionally to be spent quickly ).
Thanks in advance for your cooperation
The ANISEED Team.