Promoting coherent minimum reporting requirements for biological and biomedical investigations: The MIBBI Project

Taylor, C. F., Field, D., Sansone S.-A., Apweiler, R., Ashburner M., Ball, C. A., Binz, P.-A., Brazma, A., Brinkman, R., Deutsch, E. W., Fiehn, O., Fostel, J., Ghazal, P., Grimes, G., Hardy, N. W., Hermjakob, H., Julian, R. K. Jr., Kane, M., Kolker, E., Kuiper, M., Le Novel, N., Leebens-Mack, J., Lewis, S. E., McNally, R., Mehrle, A., Morrison, N., Quackenbush, J., Robertson, D. G., Rocca-Serra, P., Smith, B., Snape, J., Sterk, P. & Wiemann, S. Nature Biotechnology, 26, 889-896. Aug 2008. doi: 10.1038/nbt.141

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains.