Welcome to this site!

This facility is devoted to the Bioinformatics community. Our main goal with this site is to further development of Bioinformatics by contributing to pervasive and enhanced quality education.

A common place to teach and to learn!

This site has been originally developed within the EMBnet community. It is to date still the single major contributor to the facility, and the owner of the server, but as a community resource it is offered to Bioinformaticians and Life/Health scientists alike as a shared service.

We are cooperating with a number of Bioinformatics societies (RIB, ABionet, RTNBioinformática, etc...) and institutions to consolidate this resource. As contributions from other sites start to pour in and become relevant, we will be changing the look and feel and to accommodate their preferences. We are actually looking forward to the time when this site displays more prominently its multiple influences!

As a matter of fact, you may consider this to be a temporary situation while all the alliances get consolidated and we can settle together on a more definitive (or perhaps evolving) situation by mutual agreement.

Using the site

EMBnet wishes to offer everybody this site as a reference platform for education in Bioinformatics. Thus, everybody with a legit interest on education in Bioinformatics is welcome to join.

Students

If you are a worker or a student in Life of Health Sciences, you are mostly welcome to enroll and participate in any running electronic course. Please, note that active courses may require additional steps to enroll (depending mainly on the organizer requirements).

Usually most courses are open for generic, free access after they are finished. If you do not need personalized tuition, you are welcome to visit any open course as well, and to peruse all available materials for your education.

Educators

If you are a teacher, professor, researcher or in any other way related to education in Informatics applied to the Life and Health Sciences, you are most welcome to join the team and participate. Here are a few of the options you may enjoy:

Exchange server

You are most welcome to browse, download and use any of the materials in the exchange section provided that you always respect the licensing and copyright requirements associated with each one. Please, note that you may comment on and rate all materials in our site.

If you have any materials that you would like to share with the community, we are eager to host them and help you spread them for your and everybody else's benefit. In this case, please, do make sure you have all the rights needed to publish and distribute the materials and that you state the usage terms and conditions clearly. Reading our advice for authors may be of help.

If you have doubts or comments on using any of the materials or on the practice of teaching using electronic tools, you are welcome to join in the discussion forum or to post your comments and ratings to any of the entries.

To download materials from the course exchange, you only need to browse it. To add materials you only need to create an account for yourself.

Open courses

The exchange server may seem too limited at the beginning. This is so because we tend to favor more complete, integrated and coherent course materials over disperse contributions.

We expect that complete courses will be more useful as a blueprint or starting point for educators to build on their own customized courses. Hence we advise that you start always reviewing any existing courses that match or relate to the course you want to build and start adding/removing from them.

Similarly, we believe that the best way for you to contribute to the community is to provide your own courses as an integrated resource, and are willing to host your materials or mirror them.

You may add the materials yourself individually in the course exchange or add complete courses as a teacher of the site (see below)

Closed courses

If you are a member of any cooperating Bioinformatics Society (e.g. RIB, APBionet, RTNBioinformática, etc...), research/academic institution or University and want to host/publish your Bioinformatics courses here, you are most welcome to do so (currently at no cost!).

In order to manage/add/administer courses we need to open for you a suitably privileged account. The easiest way is to register yourself, and then contact the site administrators stating your interest in gaining access privileges, and your filiation (which Society, Insitute or University you belong to).

We will open a category for your courses and you will be able to add and administer courses within it. Students will be able to access your courses in this site using the registration methods provided (free, password protected, etc..).

Mirroring the site

We understand in most occasions it will not make sense to host your active courses here (but we would till like to keep a copy of them for common reference), either because you have your own local server, specific policies or because you prefer the advantages of local copies (e.g. increased network bandwidth, redundancy).

You may mirror individual courses and shared materials simply downloading the course backup and uploading it locally.

If you want to make a mirror of all the contents you are welcome as well, but in this case the procedure may be more complex or tedious and we advice you to contact our administrators to find out what is the best approach and to get help.