Community-wide collaboration is a must to reinstall trust in bioinformatics solutions and biomedical interpretation


Creative Commons License

TAKAN S., Allmer J.

JOURNAL OF INTEGRATIVE BIOINFORMATICS, cilt.20, sa.1, 2023 (ESCI) identifier identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 20 Sayı: 1
  • Basım Tarihi: 2023
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1515/jib-2022-0028
  • Dergi Adı: JOURNAL OF INTEGRATIVE BIOINFORMATICS
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Scopus, EMBASE, INSPEC, MEDLINE, Directory of Open Access Journals
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: bioinformatics, code smells, software development, software quality, virtualization, ALIGNMENT, SEQUENCE, SEARCH
  • Ankara Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Science has become a highly competitive undertaking concerning, for example, resources, positions, students, and publications. At the same time, the number of journals presenting scientific findings skyrockets while the knowledge increase per manuscript seems to be diminishing. Science has also become ever more dependent on computational analyses. For example, virtually all biomedical applications involve computational data analysis. The science community develops many computational tools, and there are numerous alternatives for many computational tasks. The same is true for workflow management systems, leading to a tremendous duplication of efforts. Software quality is often of low concern, and typically, a small dataset is used as a proof of principle to support rapid publication. Installation and usage of such tools are complicated, so virtual machine images, containers, and package managers are employed more frequently. These simplify installation and ease of use but do not solve the software quality issue and duplication of effort. We believe that a community-wide collaboration is needed to (a) ensure software quality, (b) increase reuse of code, (c) force proper software review, (c) increase testing, and (d) make interoperability more seamless. Such a science software ecosystem will overcome current issues and increase trust in current data analyses.