Nature Publishing Group and Blueprint North America Deepen their Relationship

(I-Newswire) April 21, 2005 - "We have been working with Blueprint North America since 2003 to advance emerging interaction data to the scientific community," says Dr. Timo Hannay, associate director of Web Publishing at NPG. "They have demonstrated to us their commitment and ability. Consequently, we have implemented a process that can confidentially forward them pre-publication manuscripts from Nature-branded titles, enabling the relevant BIND records to be published simultaneously with the papers."

"In September 2004, we met with Blueprint North America's representatives at our New York offices, where they outlined their plan to service our Nature-branded journals," says Dr. Beatrice Renault, Publisher, Nature Research Journals. "Since then, they have delivered on their commitment, making our decision to deepen the relationship an easy one."

"When we first approached NPG early in 2003, they recognized the value in what we are trying to achieve immediately," says Mr. Eric Andrade, Blueprint's Managing Director-Global. "NPG has been a powerful ally ever since. With this move, they have once again taken a lead role in supporting innovation aimed at improving their ability to provide the scientific community with access to high-quality research."

BIND curators have been capturing interactions as they are published in Nature since October 2003, and have been working with Nature Cell Biology to capture interaction data pre-publication since June 2004. To date, BIND has provided Nature Cell Biology close to 150 BIND identifiers for publication, including 18 in the February 2005 issue.

"The model we use in approaching journals is to 'shadow' each issue and provide the journal with BIND identifiers as papers are published," explains Mr. Brian Bobechko, Blueprint's Manager of Database Curation. "This allows us to prove to the editors that we have a process in place that is complementary with their editorial process. By minimizing the extra work on the journal side, we make it easy for publishers to take the decision to work with us."

"We have been focused on working with journals since early in 2004 with close to 90% of curation capacity now applied to the capture of new journal data," adds Blueprint's Journal Relations Officer, Dr. John Moniakis. "We've even taken the time to develop logistical software tools just to manage our journal relationships; that is how seriously we take these partnerships. We hope to be able to cover all journals publishing interaction data within the next year."

"From Day 1 at Blueprint North America, we have been intent on serving the needs of interaction researchers worldwide and doing so in a complete, consistent, and professional manner such that journal editors would choose to include BIND IDs in every manuscript published," says Dr. Hogue. "I am thrilled by the way in which the Blueprint team has prevailed through hard work, an unfailing dedication to quality, and razor-sharp 'customer' focus to achieving these critical objectives."

The NPG journals include:

Cell Death & Differentiation, Molecular Systems Biology, Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Genetics, Nature Immunology, Nature Medicine, Nature Methods, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, Oncogene, The EMBO Journal.

About Nature Publishing Group

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is the scientific publishing arm of Macmillan Publishers Ltd, combining the excellence of: Nature, Nature Research Journals, Nature Reviews, NPG Academic Journals, and Nature Clinical Practice Journals to provide the world's premier information resource for the basic biological and physical sciences. For more information, visit http://npg.nature.com.

About The Blueprint Initiative

The Blueprint Initiative is a research program of the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute (SLRI) at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, with an affiliated node in Singapore. Led by principal investigator Dr. Christopher Hogue, Blueprint develops, hosts, and maintains public biological databases and bioinformatics software tools such as BIND, SeqHound, and Distributed Folding. To accomplish these goals, Blueprint has received invaluable support from NSERC, Genome Canada, CIHR, the Economic Development Board of Singapore, and corporate partners such as Sun Microsystems and Foundry Networks. For more information on Blueprint, visit http://www.blueprint.org.

About The Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute

Established in 1985, the SLRI at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto is one of the world's leading centres for biomedical research. The Institute is part of Mount Sinai Hospital, an internationally recognized academic health centre affiliated with the University of Toronto. SLRI has 513 research, administrative and support staff, 100,000 square feet of laboratory space and a 25,000-square-foot pre-clinical research lab. For more information about SLRI research, visit http://www.mshri.on.ca

About Mount Sinai Hospital

Mount Sinai Hospital is recognized nationally and internationally for its excellence in the provision of compassionate patient care, teaching and research. Its key priority programs are Women's and Infants' Health, Surgical Subspecialties and Oncology, Internal Medicine and Subspecialties, and the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute. It is a University of Toronto-affiliated patient care, teaching and research centre. Visit http://www.mtsinai.on.ca for more information about Mount Sinai Hospital.

For more information contact:
Randall C Willis
Tel: 416-596-6266
e-Mail: rwillis@blueprint.org

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