Bioinformatics paper is in Nature’s hitparade

An opinion article in Nature Biotechnology, written by an international group of scientists including two from the University of Groningen, has featured in the ‘most read’ and ‘trending online’ top 50 lists of articles on the Nature website.

The article, Toward effective software solutions for big biology , was published in July and discusses pressing concerns that need to be resolved in the field of bioinformatics software development. Much of the bioinformatics software currently available was developed in relative isolation by biology PhD students during funded experimental research programmes. This software is necessary in order to analyse Big Data produced by research in the field of genetics.

The authors call for more Open Access collaboration in the production of software, and argue that writing this software is a scientific field in itself: ‘W e propose that the software contribution itself counts toward scientific track record’.

At the time of writing, the article had just dropped out of the top-50 in 'most read', but was still in the ‘trending online’ list.

The authors from Groningen are Ritsert Jansen, Groningen Bioinformatics Centre, University of Groningen, and Pjotr Prins, now working at the University Medical Center Utrecht.