New Q-Bio Archives

[Ken Miller]

Hi,

I received the following announcement which seems very relevant to these
lists, so I am passing it on.  I am not formally involved in the Q-Bio
archive, just an interested potential user.

List moderator: It's probably best if you just post the announcement
below without this header from me, since I have nothing to do with it,
but it's up to you.

Ken Miller
 
        Kenneth D. Miller               telephone: (415) 476-8217
	Professor			fax: (415) 476-4929
        Dept. of Physiology, UCSF	internet: ken at phy.ucsf.edu
        513 Parnassus			www: http://www.keck.ucsf.edu/~ken
        San Francisco, CA 94143-0444    

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Announcement of new Quantitative Biology (q-bio) archive
15 Sept 2003

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, an increasing number of researchers from mathematics, 
computer science, and the physical sciences have been joining biologists in 
the ongoing revolution in biology. In a variety of ways, these researchers 
are contributing towards making biology a quantitative science. With this 
letter, we announce the formation of the q-bio archive 
(http://arXiv.org/archive/q-bio, see also http://arXiv.org/new/q-bio.html), 
which aims to serve the need of this emerging community. If you and your 
colleagues have active interest in quantitative biology (including but not 
limited to biological physics, computational biology, neural science, 
systems biology, bioinformatics, mathematical biology, and theoretical 
biology), we urge you to subscribe to the archive and submit (p)reprints to 
it. Both theoretical and experimental contributions are welcome, and 
subscription is freely accessible over the internet to all members of the 
scientific community. Instructions for registration, submission and 
subscription to the archive can be found at 
http://arXiv.org/help/registerhelp, http://arXiv.org/help/uploads, and 
http://arXiv.org/help/subscribe.

The q-bio archive has grown out of a well-established series of e-Print 
archives accessible at http://arxiv.org/. The number of biology-related 
submissions to these archives has risen steadily over the last several 
years, and is averaging over 40/month so far in 2003. Unfortunately, these 
submissions are currently scattered across a number of sub-archives 
(including physics, cond-mat, nonlinear science, math, etc.), reflecting 
mostly the "home field" of the contributors rather than the subject matters 
of their submissions. Many colleagues have expressed the desire to have a 
centralized archive to share their latest results, and to learn about 
related findings by others in this field. The q-bio archive is designed to 
address this problem. It is organized mainly according to different 
categories of biological processes and partitioned according to their 
scales in space and time. The categories http://arXiv.org/new/q-bio.html 
range from molecular and sub-cellular structures to tissues and organs, 
from the kinetics of molecules to population and evolutionary dynamics. In 
addition, a separate category is devoted to method-dominated contributions, 
including computational algorithms, experimental methods, as well as novel 
approaches to analyzing experimental data. All submissions are required to 
choose a primary category, with the option for one or more secondary 
categories. Subscribers of the archive will receive by e-mail the 
title/abstracts of all submissions in their chosen categories on a regular 
basis. A large number of bio-related submissions to the e-Print archives 
during the past decade have already been identified and categorized 
according to the above scheme using an automated procedure. They can be 
accessed at http://arxiv.org/archive/q-bio.

Please note that the current list of categories is a compromise between the 
large number of active subject matters in biology and the areas of 
quantitative biology where the e-print archives have received significant 
contributions during the past several years. The subject list will 
undoubtedly be updated as the major active areas develop/shift in time. 
This continuous structuring of the archive is overseen by an advisory 
committee. It consists of a number of well-established biologists, William 
F. Loomis (UCSD), Chuck Stevens (Salk), Gary Stormo (WUSTL), Diethard Tautz 
(Cologne), together with a number of dedicated volunteers who will serve as 
"moderators" for each category listed at http://arXiv.org/new/q-bio.html. 
If you have suggestions to improve the q-bio archive, please contact the 
coordinators or the relevant moderators by e-mail.