WIRI_Agreement

The undersigned organisations agree that a paradigm shift is necessary in the way in which biomedical research is carried out. It is necessary that laboratory and clinical observations are accumulated and made accessible to all those who can use them to develop or to validate new hypotheses; it is necessary that the knowledge we have on a sub-system, a certain dimensional scale, or a certain biophysical aspect can be formalised and interconnected to others that are being developed on contiguous sub-systems, scales, domains. We call this new approach Integrative Biomedical Research.

The undersigned organisations agree to foster by all means an international collaboration aimed to promote the development of Integrative Research in biomedicine by pursuing collectively or independently the following common goals:

• Common Objectives
• Call the same things by the same name: consensus on definitions
• Define and constantly revise the goals of the Integrative Research Initiative
• Develop descriptions of the expected results, and of their impact on the life of humanity
• Research Challenges
• Promote consensus over the grand challenges Integrative Research poses
• Suggest research and technological development objectives considered essential for success of the Integrative Research Initiative
• Resources Required
• Maintain an Integrative Research Investment Monitor which lists all Integrative Research projects and the relevant resources invested on them
• Develop a lobbying strategy that allow the World Integrative Research Initiative to support integrative research within public and private grant agencies
• Start a collective open source software project for supporting this integrative research initiative
• Promote studies on long-term sustainability and related business models
• Ethical, Legal and Gender Issues
• Maintain the GEL (Gender-Legal-Ethical) observatory to monitor the legal barriers to the development of Integrative Research
• Interoperability
• Develop standards that ensure the federation of digital libraries and repositories relevant to the Integrative Research Initiative
• Create a central repository of Software Tools that list and comment all software that might be useful for an Integrative Research project
• Develop, maintain and harmonise semantic representations of the Integrative Research knowledge space
• Community Building
• Creating a single web site or a federated portal that can provide a single entry point for the whole Integrative Research community
• Promote Integrative Research with a top-down approach by ensuring that each major scientific society has an Integrative Research panel (this includes IEEE, IUPS, ASME, IFMBS, EMABES, etc.)
• Promote Integrative Research with a bottom-up approach by encouraging initiatives aimed at fostering the creation of new Integrative Research projects, and the idea of team science in biomedical research
• Publish Integrative Research News, a monthly electronic newsletter
• Promote initiatives that establish a sense of community, such as logos, T-shirts, etc.
• Run the World Integrative Research Conference and other similar events, e.g. a small but highly publicised event to which only those who have most actively developed the field in the past year are invited.

Consortium	Country	Representative	Agreed on
Europhysiome	Europe	Gordon Clapworthy	13 March 2007
IUPS Physiome	New Zeland	Peter Hunter	14 March 2007
NSR Physiome	USA	James B. Bassingthwaighte	15 March 2007
SIMBIOS	USA	Scott Delp	16 March 2007
LHDL	Europe	Marco Viceconti	in progress
@neurIST	Europe	Alejandro Frangi	9 april 2007
VMHC	China	Wang Chengtao	16 March 2007
Japanese Physiome Initiative	Japan	Yoshihisa Kurachi	in progress

 
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