Thank you, Volunteers and Citizen Scientists

Thank you for joining (or being interested in joining) our exploratory effort to increase the accessibility and utility of knowledge from scientific literature. Your enthusiasm and generosity has helped to demonstrate that citizen science has great potential for addressing informatics challenges in biomedical research. Although we have collected enough data to better understand the ways our platform could be improved to address these challenges, we do not feel that we will be able to curate enough knowledge to uncover clues for identifying potential treatment strategies of NGLY1-deficiency (the ultimate goal for this phase of the project). As a result, we are no longer seeking contributions via the current version of Mark2Cure. Instead, we will investigate other pieces necessary to move forward with the project in the future (funding, integration, collaboration, etc.)

As with many citizen science projects, our initial analyses efforts have been to demonstrate the quality and value of the project and data to the rest of the scientific community and other potential stakeholders resulting in the following papers.

• Citizen Science for Mining the Biomedical Literature. Citiz Sci. 2016;1(2). pii: 14. doi: 10.5334/cstp.56. Epub 2016 Dec 31.

• Aligning Needs: Integrating Citizen Science Efforts into Schools Through Service Requirements. Hum Comput (Fairfax). 2019;6(1):56-82

• Applying Citizen Science to Gene, Drug, and Disease Relationship Extraction from Biomedical Abstracts. Bioinformatics. 2019 Sep 3. pii: btz678. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btz678.

We expect that further exploration of the data may lead to more insight on how to best leverage citizen science to facilitate biomedical discovery, and hope to invite you to join us on a new, improved platform in the future.

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