I have been working with Robert Stevens and James Malone on some guidelines for Minimal Information for Reporting an Ontology (MIRO). This effort is not affiliated with the OBO Foundry, but shares some of the aims. We’d like your input, there is a survey that should take you only 10 minutes here:

https://jamesmalone.typeform.com/to/uJIhzR

The survey asks you to rate the importance of each guideline and optionally comment on each guideline - on any aspect including wording. There’s also an opportunity to say what you believe is missing.

The basic idea here is to try and come up with some guidelines for what information should be reported when submitting a paper about an ontology. Different reviewers may have different ideas about what is required (note this is different from, but overlapping with, the information we’d have in a registry such as the OBO library).

We’d like to find out what as wide a collection of people as we can reasonably reach think are the minimal information for reporting on an ontology. These guidelines will then be available to the community of authors and reviewers to help make the process of disseminating information about an ontology more consistent and contain what readers need to see. These can form guidelines for both reviewers and authors of papers. To do this we’d like to have as much ontology community input as possible.

Once we have input we will review what we get as feedback and revise the MIRO guidelines appropriately. We will also publish a summary of the responses to the survey and what we plan to do in response.

We appreciate your help and feedback!

Robert Stevens (1), James Malone (2) and Chris Mungall (3)

  1. University of Manchester, UK
  2. FactBio, UK
  3. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA