Beta Experiment

Mark2Cure's Beta Experiment
Aim: To verify that volunteers and citizen scientists could be trained to perform biocuration tasks at an acceptable level and would be willing to contribute their time doing these tasks

Document set and Training: Tutorials were designed based on the rules outlined for an existing disease-focused document set (which was annotated by PhD-level curators). There were ~600 abstracts in this document set. Each abstract needed to be examined and annotated by at least 15 different volunteers/citizen scientists. Hence, roughly 9000 document annotations would be needed in order to complete the beta experiment

Results: In total, 212 volunteers submitted 10,345 document annotations in just over 4 weeks. Our community ended on a high note, with almost half of the effort contributed in the final week!

Time line:

2015.01.19 - Mark2Cure Invite-Only launch

2015.01.23 - Mark2Cure opened to public via social media

2015.01.31 - UT San Diego article on Mark2Cure released

2015.02.16 - Mark2Cure Beta Experiment is completed