User:Chrisftaylor/MIBBI

Minimum information (MI) checklists specify the information that should be provided when reporting research. They promote transparency and data accessibility, and support more thorough quality assessment. However, with no mechanisms to coordinate checklist development, establishing the number of extant checklists and tracking their evolution were both challenging exercises. Furthermore, overlaps in scope between checklists and arbitrary decisions on wording and structure almost guaranteed significant incompatibilities.

Consequently, representatives of several checklist development consortia began the MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations) project, which provides access to checklists and their developers (a ‘one-stop shop’), and fosters the development of a new, modular, fully integrated checklist suite from the existing products of the various participant communities.

The MIBBI project is now an established part of the standards landscape: For example, BMC journals (amongst others) “recommend authors refer to the MIBBI Portal for prescriptive checklists for reporting biological and biomedical research where applicable” (e.g., BMC Bioinformatics) and Nature Group journals regularly mention us (e.g., this Editorial). The Portal now lists some thirty guidelines projects. The Foundry is generating new modules. The ‘MICheckout’ download tool will soon go live on the site; and data capture tools such as ISAcreator are prototyping ways to help researchers follow MIBBI guidelines.