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BioRender – Professional Science Figures

185 points by Schiphol 7y ago

vikramkr 7y ago
This is amazing - I wish I had this a few weeks ago when I was making a presentation. Does anyone know if images made when on a paid plan would be usable for commercial/publication purposes forever? Or is is only licensed for as long as you have a subscription? I tried to find that on the website but I might just have been missing something obvious, or maybe theres some usual legal standard about how this sort of IP licensing is done by default?
- d-sc 7y ago
  It’s in their TOS. The answer is more or less forever: “Standard Commercial License: A BioRender Standard Commercial License is provided to all paid industry accounts allows you to use our Asset(s) anywhere in the world, and the license never expires. You may use the Asset(s) in websites, print, presentations, publications, social media sites, marketing and advertising material, broadcasts, and for internal communication. However, you may not share or distribute the Asset(s) in any way that would let others use the Asset(s) without licensing it themselves.”
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    >However, you may not share or distribute the Asset(s) in any way that would let others use the Asset(s) without licensing it themselves.” What does that imply, a watermark on every powerpoint slide?
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    So we wouldn't be able to photo ship in a diagram into a bigger diagram later and would need to make it not downloadable if we post diagrams on our website? What if someone screenshots it from a journal publication?
    - jsty 7y ago
      If I had to guess, I'd say the intent behind it was "don't produce content which you then license out for re-use by third parties", not "you must make it physically impossible for third parties to re-use the content, even if they're willing to infringe copyright".
- lamename 7y ago
  Not explicitly but in their FAQ: "...upgrade to one of our subscription plans in order to attain publication/commercial rights for your BioRender images." Presumably that means permanent licensing of some kind is included if you pay for the right plan, but need more info.
twic 7y ago
Have these people ever seen an actin filament?! This is an outrage! https://biorender.com/icon/cell-structures/cytoskeleton-and-ecm/actin-simplified-5/ https://biorender.com/icon/cell-structures/cytoskeleton-and-...
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 7y ago
  That's Actin (simplified 5). Try Actin (filament): https://biorender.com/icon/cell-structures/cytoskeleton-and-ecm/actin-filament/ https://biorender.com/icon/cell-structures/cytoskeleton-and-...
  - twic 7y ago
    That's a good picture for the ultrastructure nerds. But as a reformed cell nerd, my beef with the diagram i linked to is that the structure is wiggly, implying that it is slack and flexible. Actin isn't. Whenever you see actin filaments in a cell, they're part of a structure that is either under tension, and so is made of long straight bits, or compression, and so is lots of short straight bits anchored to something. EDIT Here is a lovely picture showing the actin in cancer cells growing on a glass slide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_picture_candidates/Actin_Filaments_in_a_Cultured_Cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_picture_can... The actin next to the slide is red, and the actin on the top of the cell is purple. Around the edge, you have filopodia and lamellipodia, small compression structures poking outward from the cell. In the left half, you have stress fibres, tension structures anchored in adhesions on the bottom of the cell, concentrated near the edge, and reaching up into the cell body. I'm not certain what the little scribbles making up the crown on the cell's head (around the purple blob) are, but i think they're little flaps sticking up out of the cell which are involved in pinocyosis - compression structures like the lamellipodia. Bottom-rightward of the purple blob you can see a cell-cell junction, a sort of vague line with perpendicular stress fibres terminating in it. The little dots are probably associated with vesicles (not sure if those are in tension or compression, actually).
    - mmmrtl 7y ago
      Aren't you conflating actin (a protein) with actin filaments (a polymer/superstructure made up of many individual actin units)?
writimov 7y ago
Great product! But I almost quit your signup process. Forcing me to answer survey questions about my field and give my company name before I can see what your software can do makes me not want to sign up.
huhtenberg 7y ago
How times a' changing. Just few years ago this would've shipped as a standalone desktop software that would've cost a one-time fee in low hundreds at most, but more likely under a $100. This is after all a vector editor with specialized clip art library. This BioRender thing apparently costs over 400 per year at its cheapest. I realize that this obviously means that there's a demand even at these terms, but that's just... disconcerting to see for some reason. It's one of the cases when conversion from an installable product to an online service is done merely to justify recurrent monthly charges rather than for any actual user benefits.
- berdon 7y ago
  Why is this being down-voted? It is a clip art application with a monthly subscription cost. It seems like a pretty on-the-mark comment.
  - psychometry 7y ago
    They designed 20,000 specialized vector graphic icons. Do you think it's quick and/or cheap to do that?
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      It's not. But it's entirely orthogonal to this being an application vs. a Service as a Software Substitute.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - cosmodisk 7y ago
    It may be so.Bu then again,JIRA is essentially an app that allows to drag a fancy digital post-it across 3 different stages..Yet somehow it is Atlassian booked 800M revenue last year...
    - 7y ago
madhadron 7y ago
This makes me feel sad. Biology textbooks are full of these kinds of diagrams, and my impression from dealing with people who came up through normal biology training is that they are a hindrance to learning to think about biological systems in two ways: 1. They give the impression of a mechanical system like you might make out of an erector set as opposed to the chaotic, roiling mass that is the interior of a cell. 2. They prevent students from learning to think in terms of relations among observed quantities without overspecifying them.
- pazimzadeh 7y ago
  Agreed, but I think the real problem is that the medium for communicating science is still basically a static PDF. Even if you use fancy microscopy to capture some of this roiling biology, the best you can do is link to a video file in the supplementary section of your paper, which few people will visit. Or to summarize the information in a bar graph. This is so disappointing in this day and age where everyone at least has a computer, if not an iPad, capable of displaying video and animations in line with text. And it would be great if BioRender would apply the principles laid out in "Stop Drawing Dead Fish" by Bret Victor: https://vimeo.com/64895205 https://vimeo.com/64895205
- aheilbut 7y ago
  On the other hand, biology is so complicated that you have to simplify things down to abstractions that let you communicate and reason about causal stories, and that's what these sorts of figures are good for.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    Completely agree, but the clip-art approach doesn't help - it's often easier to understand casual relationships in terms of colored dots for partitions or very basic parameterization like node size in a graph, than to with clip art of tiny livers or brains. Many of the more successful abstractions seem like they would make for extremely fun games. I've seen a few Fantastic Voyage! bio-themed videogames but they are usually either stupid memory games designed to teach technical terms, recycled space invader games with bacteria clip art, or simulations like FoldIt that are fun puzzles but don't really capture the dynamism and system behaviors that make biology so interesting. If you'll forgive me venting my spleen, I really really want a game that lets me run the immune system. I don't need it to look like the inside of a bio textbook, I need it to model the information-production-distribution-processes and their strong resemblance to dynamic wargaming.
gonogo 7y ago
Does anyone else get the feeling that there is a tacit assumption that clip art is frowned upon when making figures? Coming from a neuroscience background, most papers I have seen have diagrams specifically designed for said paper.
aheilbut 7y ago
Was this built on some underlying web-based vector graphics editing library, or did they build the whole app from scratch?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
msaharia 7y ago
Nice! Are there any open source or cheaper alternatives to these? At $39 a month, this is more expensive than Microsoft Office! For students, that is almost impossible to cough up for intermittent usage.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
cryoshon 7y ago
if i still worked in the lab, i'd be all over this product, even if it's pricey. everyone has had to sit through powerpoint presentations with terrible clip art where a well-meaning colleague tries to explain their new hypothesis and is constantly stymied by not having fruitful visual aids. and let me tell you from experience, you feel just as bad when you're the one making the presentation.
itsa 7y ago
Awesome product!
JabavuAdams 7y ago
Looks great. Too many questions on signup -- I fell out of the funnel.
ReedJessen 7y ago
Super cool. The pricing seems a little bit low to me. Considering the target customer and the quality of the competition, I suspect you could charge more. That being said, I could see how this may be deliberate and you have ambitions of addition upsell or consulting revenue. Just point this out because it's a personal weakness of mine to not price my offerings high enough, even when it's obviously underpriced to outside observers.
intrasight 7y ago
I'm all for this being relatively expensive if it gives them the wherewithal to invest in transitioning to these diagrams being semantic and eventually drive simulation models.
cknoxrun 7y ago
If you are looking for something free that is specifically for pathways, I worked on a project called PathWhiz (http://smpdb.ca/pathwhiz http://smpdb.ca/pathwhiz) that might fit the bill. It also has the advantage of structuring the data into BioPax/SBML.

185 points by Schiphol 7y ago

This is amazing - I wish I had this a few weeks ago when I was making a presentation. Does anyone know if images made when on a paid plan would be usable for commercial/publication purposes forever? Or is is only licensed for as long as you have a subscription? I tried to find that on the website but I might just have been missing something obvious, or maybe theres some usual legal standard about how this sort of IP licensing is done by default?

d-sc 7y ago
It’s in their TOS. The answer is more or less forever: “Standard Commercial License: A BioRender Standard Commercial License is provided to all paid industry accounts allows you to use our Asset(s) anywhere in the world, and the license never expires. You may use the Asset(s) in websites, print, presentations, publications, social media sites, marketing and advertising material, broadcasts, and for internal communication. However, you may not share or distribute the Asset(s) in any way that would let others use the Asset(s) without licensing it themselves.”
- whatshisface 7y ago
  >However, you may not share or distribute the Asset(s) in any way that would let others use the Asset(s) without licensing it themselves.” What does that imply, a watermark on every powerpoint slide?
- vikramkr 7y ago
  So we wouldn't be able to photo ship in a diagram into a bigger diagram later and would need to make it not downloadable if we post diagrams on our website? What if someone screenshots it from a journal publication?
  - jsty 7y ago
    If I had to guess, I'd say the intent behind it was "don't produce content which you then license out for re-use by third parties", not "you must make it physically impossible for third parties to re-use the content, even if they're willing to infringe copyright".
lamename 7y ago
Not explicitly but in their FAQ: "...upgrade to one of our subscription plans in order to attain publication/commercial rights for your BioRender images." Presumably that means permanent licensing of some kind is included if you pay for the right plan, but need more info.

twic 7y ago

Have these people ever seen an actin filament?! This is an outrage! https://biorender.com/icon/cell-structures/cytoskeleton-and-ecm/actin-simplified-5/ https://biorender.com/icon/cell-structures/cytoskeleton-and-...

Q6T46nT668w6i3m 7y ago
That's Actin (simplified 5). Try Actin (filament): https://biorender.com/icon/cell-structures/cytoskeleton-and-ecm/actin-filament/ https://biorender.com/icon/cell-structures/cytoskeleton-and-...
- twic 7y ago
  That's a good picture for the ultrastructure nerds. But as a reformed cell nerd, my beef with the diagram i linked to is that the structure is wiggly, implying that it is slack and flexible. Actin isn't. Whenever you see actin filaments in a cell, they're part of a structure that is either under tension, and so is made of long straight bits, or compression, and so is lots of short straight bits anchored to something. EDIT Here is a lovely picture showing the actin in cancer cells growing on a glass slide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_picture_candidates/Actin_Filaments_in_a_Cultured_Cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_picture_can... The actin next to the slide is red, and the actin on the top of the cell is purple. Around the edge, you have filopodia and lamellipodia, small compression structures poking outward from the cell. In the left half, you have stress fibres, tension structures anchored in adhesions on the bottom of the cell, concentrated near the edge, and reaching up into the cell body. I'm not certain what the little scribbles making up the crown on the cell's head (around the purple blob) are, but i think they're little flaps sticking up out of the cell which are involved in pinocyosis - compression structures like the lamellipodia. Bottom-rightward of the purple blob you can see a cell-cell junction, a sort of vague line with perpendicular stress fibres terminating in it. The little dots are probably associated with vesicles (not sure if those are in tension or compression, actually).
  - mmmrtl 7y ago
    Aren't you conflating actin (a protein) with actin filaments (a polymer/superstructure made up of many individual actin units)?

writimov 7y ago

Great product! But I almost quit your signup process. Forcing me to answer survey questions about my field and give my company name before I can see what your software can do makes me not want to sign up.

huhtenberg 7y ago

How times a' changing. Just few years ago this would've shipped as a standalone desktop software that would've cost a one-time fee in low hundreds at most, but more likely under a $100. This is after all a vector editor with specialized clip art library. This BioRender thing apparently costs over 400 per year at its cheapest. I realize that this obviously means that there's a demand even at these terms, but that's just... disconcerting to see for some reason. It's one of the cases when conversion from an installable product to an online service is done merely to justify recurrent monthly charges rather than for any actual user benefits.

berdon 7y ago
Why is this being down-voted? It is a clip art application with a monthly subscription cost. It seems like a pretty on-the-mark comment.
- psychometry 7y ago
  They designed 20,000 specialized vector graphic icons. Do you think it's quick and/or cheap to do that?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    It's not. But it's entirely orthogonal to this being an application vs. a Service as a Software Substitute.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  It may be so.Bu then again,JIRA is essentially an app that allows to drag a fancy digital post-it across 3 different stages..Yet somehow it is Atlassian booked 800M revenue last year...
  - 7y ago

madhadron 7y ago

This makes me feel sad. Biology textbooks are full of these kinds of diagrams, and my impression from dealing with people who came up through normal biology training is that they are a hindrance to learning to think about biological systems in two ways: 1. They give the impression of a mechanical system like you might make out of an erector set as opposed to the chaotic, roiling mass that is the interior of a cell. 2. They prevent students from learning to think in terms of relations among observed quantities without overspecifying them.

pazimzadeh 7y ago
Agreed, but I think the real problem is that the medium for communicating science is still basically a static PDF. Even if you use fancy microscopy to capture some of this roiling biology, the best you can do is link to a video file in the supplementary section of your paper, which few people will visit. Or to summarize the information in a bar graph. This is so disappointing in this day and age where everyone at least has a computer, if not an iPad, capable of displaying video and animations in line with text. And it would be great if BioRender would apply the principles laid out in "Stop Drawing Dead Fish" by Bret Victor: https://vimeo.com/64895205 https://vimeo.com/64895205
aheilbut 7y ago
On the other hand, biology is so complicated that you have to simplify things down to abstractions that let you communicate and reason about causal stories, and that's what these sorts of figures are good for.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Completely agree, but the clip-art approach doesn't help - it's often easier to understand casual relationships in terms of colored dots for partitions or very basic parameterization like node size in a graph, than to with clip art of tiny livers or brains. Many of the more successful abstractions seem like they would make for extremely fun games. I've seen a few Fantastic Voyage! bio-themed videogames but they are usually either stupid memory games designed to teach technical terms, recycled space invader games with bacteria clip art, or simulations like FoldIt that are fun puzzles but don't really capture the dynamism and system behaviors that make biology so interesting. If you'll forgive me venting my spleen, I really really want a game that lets me run the immune system. I don't need it to look like the inside of a bio textbook, I need it to model the information-production-distribution-processes and their strong resemblance to dynamic wargaming.

gonogo 7y ago

Does anyone else get the feeling that there is a tacit assumption that clip art is frowned upon when making figures? Coming from a neuroscience background, most papers I have seen have diagrams specifically designed for said paper.

aheilbut 7y ago

Was this built on some underlying web-based vector graphics editing library, or did they build the whole app from scratch?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

msaharia 7y ago

Nice! Are there any open source or cheaper alternatives to these? At $39 a month, this is more expensive than Microsoft Office! For students, that is almost impossible to cough up for intermittent usage.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

cryoshon 7y ago

if i still worked in the lab, i'd be all over this product, even if it's pricey. everyone has had to sit through powerpoint presentations with terrible clip art where a well-meaning colleague tries to explain their new hypothesis and is constantly stymied by not having fruitful visual aids. and let me tell you from experience, you feel just as bad when you're the one making the presentation.

itsa 7y ago

Awesome product!

JabavuAdams 7y ago

Looks great. Too many questions on signup -- I fell out of the funnel.

ReedJessen 7y ago

Super cool. The pricing seems a little bit low to me. Considering the target customer and the quality of the competition, I suspect you could charge more. That being said, I could see how this may be deliberate and you have ambitions of addition upsell or consulting revenue. Just point this out because it's a personal weakness of mine to not price my offerings high enough, even when it's obviously underpriced to outside observers.

intrasight 7y ago

I'm all for this being relatively expensive if it gives them the wherewithal to invest in transitioning to these diagrams being semantic and eventually drive simulation models.

cknoxrun 7y ago

If you are looking for something free that is specifically for pathways, I worked on a project called PathWhiz (http://smpdb.ca/pathwhiz http://smpdb.ca/pathwhiz) that might fit the bill. It also has the advantage of structuring the data into BioPax/SBML.