The fields of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology have been growing steadily over the last few years boosted by an increasing need for computational techniques that can efficiently handle the huge amounts of data produced by the new experimental techniques in Biology. This calls for new algorithms and - proaches from fields such as Data Integration, Statistics, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Optimization, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. Also, new global approaches, such as Systems Biology, have been emerging replacing the reductionist view that dominated biological research in the last d- ades. Indeed, Biology is more and more a science of information needing tools from the information technology field. The interaction of researchers from diff- ent scientific fields is, more than ever, of foremost importance and we hope this event will contribute to this effort. IWPACBB'10 technical program included a total of 30 papers (26 long papers and 4 short papers) spanning many different sub-fields in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Therefore, the technical program of the conference will certainly be diverse, challenging and will promote the interaction among computer scientists, mathematicians, biologists and other researchers. We would like to thank all the contributing authors, as well as the members of the Program Committee and the Organizing Committee for their hard and highly valuable work. Their work has helped to contribute to the success of the IWAPCBB'10 event. IWPACBB'10 wouldn't exist without your contribution.

This volumeofLecture Notes in Bioinformatics (LNBI) containsselectedpapers from the workshop of the BioLINK Special Interest Group (SIG) on Linking Literature,InformationandKnowledgeforBiology. TheworkshopwasheldJune 28-29, 2009 at the ISMB/ECCB 2009 conference in Stockholm (http://www. iscb. org/ismbeccb2009). The BioLINK SIG meeting has been regularly held in association with the ISMB conferences since 2001, focusing on the development and application of resources and tools for biomedical text mining. The SIG is interdisciplinary in nature, and brings together researchers applying natural language processing, textmining,informationextractionandretrievalinthebiomedicaldomain,with scientistsfrombioinformaticsandbiology. ThisyeartheSIGincludedtwospecial sessions, one on the analysis of images and ?gures, which play a critial role in scienti?c papers, and the other on the future of scienti?c publication. Overview papers concerned with both these topics are included in this volume. Themeetingfeaturedinvitedtalks,presentationsofpeer-reviewedcontributed papers, reports from recent evaluations and workshops, as well as a poster s- sion. The SIG solicited papers that discuss current biological image- and te- related needs, the challenges of meeting them, and the tools that may help address them. Speci?c topics include: biological image analysis and its relati- ship to biomedical text mining, application of text-mining tools to biomedical research, automated indexing of the biomedical literature, generation of str- tured digital abstracts, new evaluation measures to measure utility and usab- ity of text mining tools integrated into the biologist's work?ow, as well as new tools and applications, and future directions in biomedical text mining.