We were pleased to catch up with many GtoPdb/GtoImmuPdb users, aficionados, friends and affiliates at the BPS Pharmacology 2017 in the QEII Center in London. You can find our presentations and posters on Slideshare. Associated with this presence we have an important request to ask of users and downloaders, plus a related request for the latter. These are being made in the context of future funding considerations in general and a pending application to become an ELIXIR Europe Core Resource in particular (we joined the UK ELIXIR Node Resources last year).
We need to collect and collate “impact statements” (a.k.a. “use cases” or “translational stories”). For this we would be most grateful to receive comments from users, regardless of whether new or experienced, academic or commercial. We are pleased to have received many general compliments by different routes in recent years (including via our enquiries e-mail and Twitter) but we would like these new statements to give concrete and specific examples of the utility of our resource (detail is good but does not have to be long). This can not only include answering scientific competency questions but also educational impact (e.g. as curricular inclusions for pharmacology teaching). We will contact some of you who we engaged with at BPS 2017 (where the level of positive response was gratifyingly high) but please just e-mail us at our usual address: enquiries at guidetopharmacology.org
The second request is for those who either point to us as outlinks and/or subsume our content via downloads or webservices. These may be either as part of integration efforts or simply bringing it inside their firewalls. When we looked at in-links (i.e. resources pointing to us) last year were surprised to find well over 20 of these, about half of which we were unaware of. From citations of our 2016 NAR Database Issue paper (PMID: 26464438) we have found several new ones but we think there may be more we have either not picked up and/or who have not contacted us. Clearly, since having our content pointed to and/or subsumed is direct evidence of impact, we would be happy to have short testimonies to this effect, in particular why we were selected (n.b. commercial enterprises need not detail their internal why’s and wherefores but even general comments in this context are still useful). If any parties could send both types of examples (direct usage and subsumation) so much the better.
Note also that we welcome technical contact with all resources subsuming our content. This is not only to see if we can enhance the ease of this as a process but also to assist with making sure the latest releases are picked up. This is important since these have now reached six per year (a schedule we hope to maintain in 2018). We are aware of some meta-portals whose internal update cycles exceed this so we want to avoid them missing out on our most recent data.
Clearly we need any comments you send us to be provenanced with personal professional identities and organisational affiliations. Notwithstanding, for those applications we are currently considering nothing will be publically surfaced. Anyone who would like do us the favour of presenting their use case but needs anonymity, is still welcome to contact us (n.b. enquiry mails are only seen by core team members)
guidetopharmacology blog 
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