Such data, produced at great effort and expense, are only as useful as researchers’ ability to locate, integrate and access them. In recent years, this challenge has been met by a growing cadre of biologists — ‘biocurators’ — who manage raw biological data, extract information from published literature, develop structured vocabularies to tag data and make the information available online3 (Box 1). In the past decade, it has become second nature for biologists to visit websites to obtain data for further analysis or integration with local resources. Our survey of several well-curated databases (nine model-organism databases, Uniprot and Protein Data Bank) showed that nearly 750,000 visitors (unique IP addresses) viewed more than 20 million pages in just one month (March 2008, Eva Huala, Peter Rose, Rolf Apweiler, personal communications).