In a meeting report in the current issue of Molecular Systems Biology (3, 105; 2007), Trey Idecker, Vineet Bafna and Thomas Lemberger write that "a key challenge of systems biology is that it must integrate several disciplines, each with a very different culture for disseminating results. Within biology, manuscripts describing new work are almost always published in peer-reviewed periodicals. In contrast, within computer science and the engineering fields, new methods and results are typically presented as full-length papers at meetings and workshops. Just as journals have editorial boards that handle review of manuscripts, such conferences assemble large and reputable programme committees, which fulfill the same purpose. Publication in the best conferences, as for the best journals, is highly competitive.

This past December, several hundred scientists convened in La Jolla, California for the Second Annual RECOMB Workshop on Systems Biology (December 1–3, 2006). The meeting, which was held jointly with the RECOMB Workshop on Computational Proteomics, took place at the California Institute for Information Technology and Telecommunications in the University of California San Diego campus. RECOMB, which stands for Research in Computational Biology, has for a decade sponsored conferences that attract high-quality papers in bioinformatics, primarily from computer science.

In an effort to integrate the computational and experimental biology communities, RECOMB and Molecular Systems Biology entered into a partnership by which original, peer-reviewed papers are presented orally at the Workshop on Systems Biology and then appear as full-length manuscripts in the pages of the journal. The precise publication model was formulated after much discussion between the editors of the journal and the organizers of RECOMB. It is original and, we hope, will serve as a case study for future conferences."

See the Molecular Systems Biology website for more news of this project.