From ReactomeWiki

Contents 1 Reactome Authors 1.1 Author Recruitment 1.2 Curation Process 1.3 Reactome Author's Tool

Reactome Authors

Author Recruitment

Authors are recruited based upon their participation and prominence in a particular field or domain of biology. Reactome authors are expected to be able to describe their particular domain of biology in depth, at the molecular level. Data entered into the Reactome knowledgebase is expected to be what the "overall field agrees upon". This often initially feels a little to conservative to authors, but a Reactome curators job is to enter data with solid experimental provenance in the species being annotated.

The Reactome Editorial Team meets regularly to review author recruitment. If you would like to contribute to Reactome please contact us at help@reactome.org.

Curation Process

Reactome authors are experts in a specific field or domain of biology. Authors are paired with an experienced Reactome curator who will handle all of the technical aspects of converting the author's biological description into Reactome readable data. Often the author's contribution is described as a module. The amount of work that an author must do to complete a module is comparable to writing a review paper. The steps vary, but generally include:

• An initial meeting to lay out the scope of the curation module
• The author sends the curator a list of comprehensive review papers that teh curator can use to get up to speed on that area of biology.
• The review papers are used to sketch out a rough description of the specific steps that are involved in the pathway.
• The molecules that participate in each step are identified
• An initial draft of the pathways is prepared by the curator.
• The author and curator meet and refine the initial draft, adding literature references for each step (reaction) in the pathway, images, and human readable summation text for each reaction and pathway.
• Once the author and the curator are satisfied the module is released for internal review
• After internal review (or sometimes during), the module is released for external review by another outside expert.
• Once the reviews are complete the module is scheduled for release.
• At the time of release the module receives a doi and is now accessible by the public.

Reactome Author's Tool

We are currently developing an Author's Guide based upon the Reactome Author's Tool. The Author Tool 3.0 (Java Web Start Version) is available from the Download page of the Reactome site.

For a quick overview of the Reactome data model please see the Data Model Page and the Data Model Glossary.

For now Authors are trained at their request. We offer online training sessions, as well as group training at various topic specific scientific jamborees sponsored by Reactome. For more information contact us.