Screenshot of the 'WikiPathways in actie voor MetaKids' action page. Every day a child is born with an inherited metabolic disorder, and many do not grow old. MetaKids is a Dutch foundation that collects money and raises awareness and the charity selected this year for the NPO (Dutch national radio/tv) 3FM Serious Request. This has become a Dutch tradition. Serious Request will play music on the radio, when people contributed to the fundraiser, and the more money, the more often the music gets played.

But besides this, Serious Request also encourages people to jump into action. And we have jumped into action.

What we will do

In the week when the DJs are locked up in their glass house in Zwolle just before christmas, Dr Laura Steinbusch, Martina Kutmon, Daan van Beek, and I will work on making our open science WikiPathways knowledgebase even better to support research into these disorders. Like we did for COVID-9/SARS-CoV-2 before (see doi:10.1038/s41597-020-0477-8). Guided by experts, we will update existing maps (leveraging on the awesome work by Denise Slenter in her PhD) with recent literature, supported by computer-assisted data curation, and draw new maps where there are knowledge gaps.

Read our full statements here: https://www.npo3fm.nl/kominactie/acties/wikipathways-in-actie-voor-metakids

Part of this will be a workshop day on Thursday 19th of December in Maastricht. Details about that will follow.

In this way, we collect not only money to donate, but we also donate research.

How to donate

Well, obviously, it is a fund-raiser. So, please donate here. We have at least one donation with PayPal (not a fan) from outside The Netherlands.

We are currently at 405 euro of our 2500 euro goal. Please help us a bit closer to that goal.

How can you help

You can help us enormously by spreading the news of the “kom in actie” in your social network, and raise awareness for the cause of MetaKids. For example, by sharing our action:

Second, in good open science practice, we welcome you to join our “kom in actie”, and several other have alread indicated wanting to do so. There is plenty of work that can be done, and we are documenting our activity on a project board. Any work that will make the FAIR and open knowledge better or show the power will help. To get some ideas of how the knowledge can be used is written up in this open access chapter by Denise, Tina, and me.