The BioCreative III publications in BMC Bioinformatics are now available as the special issue Volume 12 Suppl 8. The overview article discusses the BioCreative Workshops and presents the tasks for the challenge: the gene normalization, protein-protein interaction, and interactive task. A paper dedicated to protein-protein interaction curation by the MINT and BioGRID curators describes their requirements and the generation of the challenge PPI data; this paper will be of interest for BioCreative Workshop '12 attendees. Publications by selected participants with the highest performance and/or most innovative approaches from each task round out this special issue: teams 65 (Schneider, Clematide, Rinaldi), 73 (Kim, Wilbur), 74 (Cuo, Ling, Hsu), 81 (Lourenço et al.), 83 (Wei, Cao), 89 (Agarwal, Liu, Yu), 90 (Wang et al.), and 101 (Tsai, Lai).