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MDM-Portal (Medical Data-Models) is a meta-data registry for creating, analysing, sharing and reusing medical forms, developed by the Institute of Medical Informatics, Heidelberg University Hospital in Germany. see also https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0044-1786839 Electronic forms for documentation of patient data are an integral part within the workflow of physicians. A huge amount of data is collected either through routine documentation forms (EHRs) for electronic health records or as case report forms (CRFs) for clinical trials. This raises major scientific challenges for health care, since different health information systems are not necessarily compatible with each other and thus information exchange of structured data is hampered. Software vendors provide a variety of individual documentation forms according to their standard contracts, which function as isolated applications. Furthermore, free availability of those forms is rarely the case. Currently less than 5 % of medical forms are freely accessible. Based on this lack of transparency harmonization of data models in health care is extremely cumbersome, thus work and know-how of completed clinical trials and routine documentation in hospitals are hard to be re-used. The MDM-Portal serves as an infrastructure for academic (non-commercial) medical research to contribute a solution to this problem. It already contains more than 25,000 system-independent forms (CDISC ODM Format, www.cdisc.org, Operational Data Model) with more than 600,000 data-elements. This enables researchers to view, discuss, download and export forms in most common technical formats such as PDF, CSV, Excel, SQL, SPSS, R, etc. A growing user community will lead to a growing database of medical forms. In this matter, we would like to encourage all medical researchers to register and add forms and discuss existing forms.

Mycobrowser is a resource that provides both in silico generated and manually reviewed information within databases dedicated to the complete genomes of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Mycobacterium leprae, Mycobacterium marinum and Mycobacterium smegmatis. This collection references Mycobacteria smegmatis information.

The ETOX database allows access to effects information from aquatic and terrestrial ecotoxicology. Furthermore, ETOX contains information on various national and international environmental quality guidelines, targets, standards, criteria, and limit values. In focus are substances which are relevant for assessment of surface water pollution to trigger the development of environmental quality standards according to Water Framework Directive 60/2000/EC.

The Eukaryotic Promoter Database (EPD) provides accurate transcription start site (TSS) information for promoters of 15 model organisms, from human to yeast to the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. While the original database was a manually curated database based on published experiments, new promoter collections are now produced entirely automatically (under the name “EPDnew”) based on high-throughput transcript mapping data and high-quality gene annotation resources. Corresponding functional genomics data can be viewed in a genome browser, queried or analyzed via web interfaces, or exported in standard formats like FASTA or BED for subsequent analysis with other tools; of note, EPD is tightly integrated with two tool suites developed by our group: ChIP-Seq and Signal Search Analysis, for analysis of chromatin context and sequence motif respectively. EPD provides promoter viewers, designed with the aim of integrating and displaying information from different sources about, for instance, histone marks, transcription factor-binding sites or SNPs with known phenotypes. These viewers rely upon the UCSC genome browser as a visualization platform, which enables users to view data tracks from EPD jointly with tracks from UCSC or public track hubs.

TreatmentBank (TB) is a service provided by the Swiss Plazi GmbH to liberate data from scholarly publications, and convert, enhance, link, store, and disseminate it as Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data. These data include taxonomic treatments, treatment citations, figures, tables, material citations and bibliographic reference. The data extraction processes can be highly automated to process entire journal back-issues as well as current publications. A quality control (QC) process as well as manual checks produce data fit to become reference deposits of treatments in Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR), as well as daily uploads of treatment articles data sets to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), with persistent identifiers minted in BLR. Input formats can be printed to born-digital publications. All data are openly accessible in various formats and are searchable. Currently, BLR contains more than 650,000 treatments extracted from 66,000 articles, 400,000 figures and 1,040,000 material citations.