In this article in a new journal (GenomeMedicine), we learn of the current efforts at the Cardiff University Institute of Medical Genetics to annotate the clinical meaning of the human genome. This database (of "over 85,000 different lesions detected in 3,253 different genes, with new entries currently accumulating at a rate exceeding 9,000 per annum") is arguably the human genome project most relevant to medicine. It also seems quite akin to curation projects very familiar to librarians. Can we use the knowledge and experience of librarians to increase the quality and timeliness of such genomic annotations? Can librarians learn from the efficiencies of the relatively small team of curators at Cardiff?
Finally, in the spirit of open access, would public funding of the Human Gene Mutation Database enable full free access to all the annotations?
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