As a global professional community, VarSome.com relies on its thousands of members to improve the quality and breadth of the data displayed and used to classify variants. To that end, the Publication Link Program prompts heavy users of VarSome.com to add information on publications that they have found on VarSome.com or elsewhere in their search for data on variants.
Organization Quota
Members from organizations that routinely use VarSome.com are assigned organization quota of 1 new contribution for every 100 unique variant searches across all users belonging to the same organization.
VarSome.com users are grouped automatically into organizations based on the IP address used for accessing the platform and the quota is assigned for the whole organization.
Members are prompted to contribute Pubmed ID of the publication, along with what the pathogenicity the publication assigns to that variant and other relevant information, such as disease and phenotypes, supporting functional studies, etc.
Note that only unique queries count towards that quota, so querying a variant again will not incur any delay. Further, the information members are asked to add is what is commonly obtained while investigating variants; this way the work a laboratory performs in its investigation also benefits others.
VarSome Premium
You may subscribe to the Premium version of VarSome.com with the following benefits:
- Access to licensed data resources
- no enforcing of the Publication Link Program
Background
At present, about 12% of queries on VarSome.com result in a page with user contributions. In 2019 survey for VarSome.com, we asked more than 1,200 users the question:
How useful do you find community contributions (input from other users) on VarSome pages?
Of those who have seen community contributions, 55% find them “very useful” and 13% find them as “one of the main reasons I use VarSome”.