
BioRender – Professional Science Figures - Schiphol
https://biorender.com/
======
huhtenberg
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.

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berdon
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.

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psychometry
They designed 20,000 specialized vector graphic icons. Do you think it's quick
and/or cheap to do that?

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TeMPOraL
It's not. But it's entirely orthogonal to this being an application vs. a
Service as a Software Substitute.

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writimov
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.

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madhadron
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.

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aheilbut
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
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.

~~~
reubens
+1 would like to see this game too.

As a medical student, however, I can vouch for the utility of clip art in
visualisation. You get delivered so much visual information that if there is
coherence to it, you have more chance of processing it correctly.

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vikramkr
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
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.”

~~~
vikramkr
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?

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jsty
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".

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twic
Have these people ever seen an actin filament?! This is an outrage!

[https://biorender.com/icon/cell-structures/cytoskeleton-
and-...](https://biorender.com/icon/cell-structures/cytoskeleton-and-
ecm/actin-simplified-5/)

~~~
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
That's Actin (simplified 5). Try Actin (filament):

[https://biorender.com/icon/cell-structures/cytoskeleton-
and-...](https://biorender.com/icon/cell-structures/cytoskeleton-and-
ecm/actin-filament/)

~~~
twic
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_can...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_picture_candidates/Actin_Filaments_in_a_Cultured_Cell)

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).

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mmmrtl
Aren't you conflating actin (a protein) with actin filaments (a
polymer/superstructure made up of many individual actin units)?

~~~
twic
I'm talking about actin structures. I believe the icon i linked to is intended
to depict an actin structure. If it's intended to depict a single molecule of
actin, it's even worse!

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cryoshon
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.

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msaharia
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.

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cknoxrun
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.

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gonogo
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.

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intrasight
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.

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

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

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ReedJessen
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.

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itsa
Awesome product!

