Plant Physiology and TAIR Partnership: Figure 1.

We are pleased to announce a unique partnership between Plant Physiology and The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) that we anticipate will increase the annotation of Plant Physiology in the TAIR database to nearly 100%. This partnership is the first of its kind, and, if successful, we hope this model can be extended to other journals, organisms, and databases. TAIR was created in 1999 with the goal “to provide an integrated, up-to-date view of Arabidopsis biology from genome to phenome from various sources of information ranging from personal communication with researchers to published literature” (Rhee et al., 2003, p. 224). Since its inception, TAIR has grown and now includes the complete genome sequence, along with gene structure, gene product information, metabolism, gene expression, DNA and seed stocks, genome maps, genetic and physical markers, publications, as well as information about the Arabidopsis research community. For sometime now, TAIR has been curating data from published literature, adding any new or additional information relating to Arabidopsis genetic and molecular biology data to the database. Curation is a labor-intensive process, but it makes certain that the information included in the database is high quality and as accurate as possible. By focusing on previously published literature, the widest possible coverage of annotations of the genome has been achieved. However, due to the high number of Arabidopsis-related publications and the relatively small number of TAIR curators, keeping on top of current literature is proving to be problematic. To help with this, TAIR implemented a cutoff using journal impact factor and focus was shifted to curate papers from the top of the ranked list. Plant Physiology was just at this cutoff and, due to the high volume of Arabidopsis articles that we publish, the Journal dropped from TAIR's list of top priority journals. TAIR noted that for 2006 and 2007 they were only able to curate 25% (50/200) of the Arabidopsis papers that Plant Physiology published. Screen shot of Plant Physiology's TAIR submission page (http://www.aspb.org/publications/tairsubmission.cfm).