Call for nominations for a Worm Board

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Dear Worm Community,

Following discussions at the 2015 International Worm Meeting it is apparent that there is a need for a group to support community resources and infrastructure. Here we announce the formation of a Worm Board. An ‘Interim Worm Board’, listed below, has drawn up a Charter (appended) and will hold elections for the first Worm Board.

We plan to hold the first elections in early 2016. We now ask for nominations for President, officers and regional representatives to begin terms from Spring 2016. The President-elect would serve as an officer for the first year, then become President in Spring 2017. Andrew Chisholm has agreed to serve as first President until Spring 2017, to oversee the initial stages of WormBoard.

Feel free to nominate anyone (including yourself). Nominees must be willing and able to serve a three-year term, if elected. All lab heads associated with a CGC laboratory designation will be eligible to vote. Nominations for officers can be sent to any member of the Interim Board; nominations for regional representatives should be sent to the current regional representative. The closing date for nominations will be December 31st.

Worm Board is a new way of organizing our community efforts, but is based on structures that have worked well for other genetic model organisms. For Worm Board to be effective it must have the support of the community. We welcome any feedback on this new venture; please nominate, and vote!

Interim Worm Board

Interim officers:

Julie Ahringer

Andrew Chisholm

Anne Hart

Oliver Hobert

Interim regional representatives:

US/East: Jane Hubbard (New York University)

US/Central/South: David Greenstein (University of Minnesota)

US/West: Miriam Goodman (Stanford)

Predominantly Undergraduate Institutions: Te-wen Lo (Ithaca College)

Canada and Americas: Brent Derry (Toronto)

Europe including UK (2): Peter Meister (U of Bern) and Ralf Sommer (Tuebingen)

Asia/Australasia/Oceania (2): Asako Sugimoto (Tohoku U) and Hong Zhang (CAS Beijing)

Ex officio members:

GSA liaison: Anne Villeneuve

PI of WormBase Consortium: Paul Sternberg

Director of the CGC: Ann Rougvie

elegans nomenclature coordinator: Tim Schedl

WormBook Editor-in-Chief: Iva Greenwald

PIs of the gene knockout consortia: Don Moerman, Shohei Mitani

PIs of nematode genome projects: Mark Blaxter

Current and most recent International Worm Meeting organizers: Andrew Chisholm and Marie-Anne Felix (2017); Benjamin Podbilewicz and Gillian Stanfield (2015)

Worm Board Charter

Preamble

Since its inception the C. elegans field has relied on the voluntary efforts of community-minded individuals to develop and organize key resources and meetings. As the field enters its second half-century, continued growth necessitates a more formal structure for such efforts. The Worm Board has been formed to advocate for C. elegans research internationally and to foster the continued development of community resources.

Composition of WormBoard

The WormBoard is a representative group of working scientists and educators who use C. elegans or related nematodes as their primary model organism. WormBoard will meet in odd-numbered years at the biennial International C. elegans meeting, and if possible at one of the topic or regional meetings in even-numbered years. Additional business will be conducted by email or teleconference.

Officers (total 4)

Worm Board will have four officers: A President, a President-elect, a Secretary, and an Election manager. An election held at the end of each year will chose a President-elect, who will serve as an officer the first year, then be President the second year. To ensure continuity in the Board, the President will then serve in officer positions for two additional years, first as “Secretary”, then “Election manager”.

Regional Representatives (total 9)

The regional representatives will be selected by votes of the respective communities in these regions. Regional representatives serve for a period of three years. Terms of office for the Officers and the Regional Representatives begin and end at the Board meetings in the summer. Regions are represented as follows: US/East (1); US/Central and South (1); US/West (1); Canada and Americas (1); Europe (including UK) (2); Asia/Australasia/Oceania (2); a representative of Predominantly Undergraduate Institutions (1). Representation of regions is based on approximate number of active labs and will be periodically reviewed.

Ex officio members

The following individuals or their representatives will serve on the Board as non-voting ex officio members, and may also serve as voting officers or regional representatives, if elected:

Liaison with the Genetics Society of America (a GSA board member, if available).

The PI of the WormBase consortium

The Director of the CGC

The C. elegans nomenclature coordinator.

The editor of WormBook

The PIs of the gene knockout consortium projects.

One PI of nematode genome projects

Current and most recent International Worm Meeting organizers.

WormBoard’s discussion of community issues benefits from input from the entire community. The regional representatives are responsible for canvassing C. elegans researchers from their regions on major issues. Advice from ex officio members will also be solicited on all Board issues. The Officers and the Regional Representatives, as the elected officials of the Board, constitute its voting body.

Elections

The Elections Manager is responsible for organizing the election of the Officers. Each Regional representative will serve on a nomination subcommittee and be responsible for overseeing the election of their replacement. Nominees may be proposed by the community, or be self-nominated. If there are insufficient nominations, current WormBoard members will propose nominees for each position, chosen to represent of the diversity of C. elegans researchers. Nominees must agree to be willing to serve their full terms on WormBoard. Elections will be held in December-January. Newly elected Representatives begin their term the following spring and participate in the WormBoard Meeting at the summer meeting.

Responsibilities of WormBoard

 1. To advocate for C. elegans research and represent the interests of the worldwide C. elegans scientific community.

2. To gather input, discuss, and articulate strategic goals for the C. elegans community, including a ‘White paper’ summary at regular intervals.

3. To support international cooperation and communication among C. elegans researchers.

4. To act as a liaison with other communities and scientific societies with related interests.

5. To ensure a successful International C. elegans Meeting. The Board will approve the venue and appoint the Scientific Organizers. The Board will also support the Topic and Regional meetings in alternating years, as well as other community activities.

6. To promote the relevance of C. elegans research to human health, both in fundamental discovery and in biomedical or disease modeling.

7. To promote C. elegans investigators for honors, awards, and prizes

8. To promote public outreach, educational initiatives, programs, or forums, and to support the use of C. elegans in biology education.

9. To promote the generation, maintenance, and advancement of infrastructure projects valuable to the international C. elegans community, including: the WormBase consortium, WormBook, the Caenorhabditis Genetics Center, the C. elegans gene knockout consortia, and nematode genome sequencing projects.

10. In the event that any unspent funds are available, to the Board will develop plans to administer them for the benefit of the C. elegans research community.

Prepared by Andrew Chisholm (UCSD), 12/15/15.

REMINDER!! – Gene Ontology (GO) Survey – Closes Sunday, November 15th

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Attention GO users!!  The Gene Ontology Consortium would love to hear your feedback about GO.  Please assist the GO project by completing a short survey. The results will help us learn more about how you use GO, how GO can serve your research needs better, and will aid in preparation for the upcoming GO grant renewal. Surveys completed by November 15th 2015 will be eligible for a prize drawing for a $400 Apple Store voucher.  Thanks in advance for your time!

WormBook in Genetics: access and choices

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Dear All,

I would like to address some questions that have come up regarding the partnership with the GSA and access to WormBook in the journal GENETICS.

As I said in a quote to the GSA blog, “WormBook in GENETICS will continue a great community tradition and will strengthen our longstanding association with GENETICS, which began with the publication in 1974 of Sydney Brenner’s landmark paper.   That association has grown, which is apparent in the many papers that appear every year in GENETICS and G3, as well as in the GSA’s sponsorship of the C. elegans meetings.”

GSA provides a sustainable platform for publishing WormBook, as well as the editorial and production resources of GENETICS.  However, because the GSA will be fully funding publication of new WormBook content, WormBook chapters will adhere to the journal’s current access policies, unless authors or institutions choose to subsidize immediate open access, including a Creative Commons license.

In practice, the journal’s access policy will not make much difference for most members of the community, who will continue to have immediate access to GENETICS content through their libraries and GSA memberships–which includes very low cost membership categories.  Furthermore, anyone who cannot pay may request individual article PDFs from the GENETICS Editorial Office.

The access issue was the subject of much discussion before we finalized the relationship.  But it is important to understand that there are costs to publishing, even on the web, and full open-access of WormBook at Caltech was possible only while they had sufficient funds to support it.  However, available funding, including some from WormBase, has been reduced to the point that WormBook was no longer sustainable.  Thus, the choice was to freeze WormBook in its current form altogether or find another way forward.

Several options were considered, and this association with the GSA emerged as the best option to finance and produce WormBook going forward.  Whether this arrangement should continue can be evaluated in 4-5 years.  For now, we have a fantastic opportunity, and the Section Editors are already commissioning great chapters.

It is too complicated to respond to questions about the economics of open access versus subscription publishing here–and I’m not an expert, though I know from having served as an editor of Development during the rise of the web and now, as an editor of PNAS and member of the PNAS Publications Committee, that it is very expensive to publish papers.*  Different journals have different business models, but the current access model used by GENETICS (and PNAS) is one way to keep costs down for authors, readers, and libraries.

So, thank you for your interest in, and continued support for, WormBook.

Best regards,

Iva

* It may interest some of you to see this report about the true cost of publishing a paper, where they calculate the cost in eLife as $14,000, and Nature itself estimates the cost of publishing in its own journal of $10,000!  (See http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/08/18/how-much-does-it-cost-elife-to-publish-an-article/)

Announcement of WormBook in GENETICS

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WormBook is excited to announce that we have partnered with The Genetics Society of America to publish new WormBook content in GENETICS. GENETICS will publish about 50 new chapters over the course of four years. Existing chapters will remain available at http://www.wormbook.org/, and several new and updated chapters will appear there over the next six months. Letters describing these changes from Marty Chalfie and Iva Greenwald, who succeeds Marty as WormBook Editor-in-Chief, can be found in the blog posts below.

–Jane Mendel

Announcement of WormBook in GENETICS

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From Martin Chalfie:

Dear Members of the C. elegans Community,

A little over twelve years ago several of us starting talking about the possibility of having an online review of C. elegans that would replace the outdated Cold Spring Harbor monographs (The Nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and C.elegans II).  These discussions led to the establishment of WormBook, and I became its Editor-in-Chief.  Now after shepherding over 150 articles into WormBook and reestablishing The Worm Breeders Gazette I feel that we have created a wonderful resource.  But I have found that my time has been taken up by so many other commitments recently that I no longer feel able to put the effort into WormBook that I believe it deserves (also 12 years is more than enough time for one person to be in charge).

For these reasons I have decided to step down as Editor-in-Chief.  Fortunately, Iva Greenwald, who has served as a spectacular section editor, has agreed to become the next Editor-in-Chief and oversee the changes that are necessary to keep WormBook a strong and essential resource for our community.  I know she will do a terrific job.

Before ending this letter, I want to thank the people that really made WormBook possible.  These people include Paul Sternberg as the publisher of WormBook through WormBase, whose support and enthusiasm have been essential; our two hard working editors Lisa Gerard and Jane Mendel, who made WormBook a reality; Oliver Hobert, who officially is the editor of WormMethods, but has really served as an assistant Editor-in-Chief; Lincoln Stein, Tristan Fiedler, Todd Harris, and Qinghua (Daniel) Wang, who brought WormBook to life on the web; and you the members of the Editorial Board [for the Gazette: and the past and present members of the Editorial Board], whose involvement and support made WormBook the model for all the other organism “Books.”  We have made something wonderful, and I thank all of you for showing once again the strength and dedication of the C. elegans community.

All the best,

Marty