Dear All:

After much travel this month, I see a significant amount of discussion 
with regards to technical issues is now happening on the OpenTox 
development list and has been filling my mail box :).  It is excellent 
to see contributions from "external developers at large" such as Egon, 
Richard, Rajarshi, Joerg etc starting - they are so valuable and I hope 
to see them growing.  Please let other Open Source developers know they 
are welcome to join this collaborative effort.  It would be particularly 
encouraging to see an OpenTox API compliant service beyond the initial 
FP7 partners surfacing in months to come :)!  And that we include and 
support the best efforts in the community at large ourselves, which I am 
sure we will do.

IMHO OpenTox will only be truly successful if it embraces a truly gobal 
community approach, and we figure out how to collaborate together with 
many stakeholders (and including commerical - we need I believe to 
support companies and jobs at the end of the day!), and that needs 
practical sustainable models.  In that sense we should appreciate the 
advantage that transparency brings to alternative testing approaches in 
predictive toxicology that industry and regualators are sorely needing 
and indeed increasingly demanding.  We should also be quicker, better, 
faster through the enabling of our Open Source and Open Access 
approaches in creating a "Linux foundation" for this emerging and 
growing field. Yet, we have many myths and conservative "religious 
beliefs" in the scientific community to overcome.

I will prepare a presentation on OpenTox developments for the session on 
in silico/in vitro tox for the InnovationWell meeting in Philadelphia 
next week (http://innovationwell.net/comty_confprog09predtox) in coming 
days.  I will be very happy to include contributions and opinions from 
external developers - just let me know you are happy to be includued 
etc. and on what opinions/points/developments you have yourselves etc. 
you might like included.

And keep the momentum going here!
best wishes
Barry