The IMEx consortium is an international collaboration between a group of major public interaction data providers who have agreed to share curation effort and:

• Develop and work to a single set of curation rules when capturing data from both directly deposited interaction data or from publications in peer-reviewed journals
• Capture full details of an interaction in a “deep” curation model
• Perform a complete curation of all protein-protein interactions experimentally demonstrated within a publication
• Make these interaction available in a single search interface on a common website
• Provide the data in standards compliant download formats
• Make all IMEx records freely accessible under the Creative Commons Attribution License

IMEx defines three types of membership:

• Active: IMEx partner commits to producing relevant numbers of records curated to IMEx standard and providing these via a PSICQUIC service.
• Observer: Prospective IMEx consortium member.
• Inactive: former IMEx partner who contributed to the establishment of the IMEx curation rules.

IMEx partners:

• DIP (dip.doe-mbi.ucla.edu) (Active)
• IntAct (www.ebi.ac.uk/intact) (Active)
• MINT (mint.bio.uniroma2.it/mint) (Active)
• MatrixDB (matrixdb.ibcp.fr/) (Active)
• MPIDB (www.jcvi.org/mpidb) (Active)
• Molecular Connections (www.molecularconnections.com) (Active)
• I2D (ophid.utoronto.ca/) (Active)
• InnateDB (www.innatedb.com) (Active)
• Swiss-Prot group, SIB (web.expasy.org/groups/swissprot/)
• BioGRID (www.thebiogrid.org/) (Observer)
• MPact (mips.gsf.de/genre/proj/mpact) (Inactive)
• BIND (www.blueprint.org) (Inactive)

The IMEx consortium is open to the participation of additional partners.

Data Availability

IMEx partners all produce their own separate resources, which range from all encompassing molecular interaction databases, such as are maintained by IntAct, MINT and DIP, organism-centric resources such as BioGrid or MPIDB or biological domain centric, such as MatrixDB. However additionally to this, they have committed to making records available, via a dedicated PSICQUIC webservice, which have been curated to IMEx rules and are available to the user as a single, non-redundant set of curated publications which can be searched at the IMEx website. The dataset will automatically increase with every release by a participating, member database. Data is made available in standards-compliant tab-deliminated and XML formats, enabling users to visualize the data in a wide range of tools such as Cytoscape and the R Bioconductor software. In the short term, data redundancy will be managed by ensuring that partners only contribute records from a selected list of journals (see below) or from direct submission by authors as part of the publication process. This will shortly be replaced by an internal data management system which will allow a much greater range of journal articles to be made available to the user

• Cancer cell since 01/2006: IntAct
• Cell since 01/2006: IntAct
• FEBS letters since 01/2005: MINT
• EMBO journal since 01/2006: MINT
• EMBO reports since 01/2006: MINT
• J. Bacteriologysince 08/2007: MPIDB
• J. Molecular Signaling since 11/2006: Molecular Connections (released though IntAct)
• Matrix Biology since 01/2009 MatrixDB
• Molecular Cancer since 09/2010: Molecular Connections (released through IntAct)
• Molecular Microbiology since 08/2007: MPIDB
• Nature Immunology since 09/2010 InnateDB (released throughIntAct)
• Nature Structural and Molecular Biology since 01/2006: DIP
• Oncogene since 09/2010: I2D (released through IntAct)
• Plos Biology since 01/2003: DIP
• Proteomics since 01/2005: IntAct
• Structure since 01/2006: DIP

IMEx is funded by the European Commission under PSIMEx, contract number FP7-HEALTH-2007-223411