Meeting report from the fourth meeting of the Computational Modeling in Biology Network (COMBINE)

The Computational Modeling in Biology Network (COMBINE) is an initiative to coordinate the development of community standards and formats in computational systems biology and related fields. This report summarizes the topics and activities of the fourth edition of the annual COMBINE meeting that took place in Paris September 16-20 2013, and hosted a total of 96 attendees. This edition pioneered a first day devoted to modeling approaches in biology, attracting a broad audience of scientists with a panel of renowned speakers. During the other days, discussions took place about novel standard features, new tools using the standards, and outreaching efforts. A great deal of emphasis went into extensions of the SBML format as packages, and also community building. This year’s edition showed again that the COMBINE community is thriving, and manages well the coordination of the different standard formats