NDEx: Sharing and Publishing Biological Networks for any Species

NDEx, the Network Data Exchange is an online commons where scientists can share and publish biological networks in many formats. NDEx users manage access to the networks that they store, keeping some private, sharing others with collaborators or making them publicly accessible. NDEx provides a venue in which researchers can create and distribute species-specific networks. NDEx also provides a versatile API to make networks accessible to software, from simple scripts to Cytoscape and other analytic applications. Finally, this novel infrastructure promotes the development of new applications and services such as viewers to embed ‘live’ networks directly in peer-reviewed publications. NDEx is an important step towards an ecosystem in which crowd curation allows networks bearing data, hypotheses, and findings to flow easily between scientists.  Live, hands-on examples will be shown.