Michael Hucka of the California Institute of Technology continues: "The next logical step was to build a community resource that would allow anyone to submit, download and reuse the models. That's the purpose of the BioModels database. BioModels provides access to published, peer-reviewed, quantitative models of biochemical and cell-biological systems."
Some of these systems are very simple, containing just a few processes or reactions; others contain hundreds. The models are checked to verify that they correspond to the reference publication. Human curators annotate and cross-link components of the models to other relevant data resources. This allows users to identify precisely the components of models, and helps them to retrieve appropriate models, which they can then visualize and build upon using any SBML-compatible software.
"Ultimately," says Le Novère, "we hope that publishers will encourage any author who plans to publish a new model to submit it to the BioModels database; this will ensure that all the models in the public domain are freely available for everyone to make the most of them."
The BioModels database is freely available at www.ebi.ac.uk/biomodels.