Editorial

NETTAB workshops are a series of international events on ‘Network Tools and Applications in Biology’ that are aimed at presenting and discussing emerging Information and Communication Technologies whose adoption in support of biology appear to be of particular interest. Since 2001, many different topics were discussed including: XML standardization for data integration (2001), multi agent systems (2002), scientific workflows (2005), Web Services (2006) and the Semantic Web (2007). The NETTAB 2009 workshop that was held at the Mathematics and Computer Science Department of the University of Catania, Italy, 10–13 June 2009, was focused on ‘Collaborative Bioinformatics Research and Development’ and on ‘Tools for RNA Analysis’. The workshop included many original contributions devoted to these innovative research domains, the best of which have been carefully peer reviewed and included in this Special Issue on ‘Collaborative Bioinformatics and RNA Analysis’. There is a clear switch from previous focus themes since these are aimed at different aspects of data integration, ranging from standardization, to automation of procedures. In this case, the accent is on human collaboration and ways to implement it.