Integrating scientific cultures

A key challenge of Systems Biology is that it must integrate several disciplines, each with a very different culture for disseminating results. Within biology, manuscripts describing new work are almost always published in peer-reviewed periodicals. In contrast, within computer science and the engineering fields, new methods and results are typically presented as full-length papers at meetings and workshops. Just as journals have Editorial Boards that handle review of manuscripts, such conferences assemble large and reputable Program Committees, which fulfill the same purpose. Publication in the best conferences, as for the best journals, is highly competitive. This past December, several hundred scientists convened in La Jolla, California for the Second Annual RECOMB Workshop on Systems Biology (December 1–3, 2006; http:// chianti.ucsd.edu/recombsysbio06/). The meeting, which was held jointly with the RECOMB Workshop on Computational Proteomics, took place at the California Institute for Information Technology and Telecommunications in the University of California San Diego campus. RECOMB, which stands for Research in Computational Biology, has for a decade sponsored conferences that attract high-quality papers in bioinformatics, primarily from computer science. In an effort to integrate the computational and experimental biology communities, RECOMB and Molecular Systems Biology entered into a partnership by which original, peer-reviewed papers are presented orally at the Workshop on Systems Biology and then appear as full-length manuscripts in the pages of the journal. The precise publication model was formulated after much discussion between the editors of the journal and the organizers of RECOMB. It is original and, we hope, will serve as a case study for future conferences. First, a list of 45 reviewers was approved by both Molecular Systems Biology and RECOMB to form the conference Program Committee. Based on three reviews, the RECOMB chairs considered each paper for oral presentation at the conference. Papers chosen for oral presentation were then submitted to the journal, along with the three referee reports. Among these papers, Molecular Systems Biology decided to invite a subset of the authors to submit revisions, in which case the same reviewers were asked to check the revisions before publication. Approximately 50 papers were submitted to the joint workshops, 20 of which were invited for oral presentation. Seven of these 20 were also accepted for publication in Molecular Systems Biology. Thus, 40% of the submitted papers were granted oral presentations at the conference, whereas 14% of all submissions were accepted for publication in Molecular Systems Biology as written Reports. Computational methods for data integration