nodalpoint.org

This forum post is just to see how others in the field of bioinformatics think about an issue that in my opinion is rather important. By "software fit for publication" I mean software that is rushed out just for the paper then not actively mantained, mantained poorly, or down right abandoned.

At least in the field of microarrays I've seen a couple examples of such software. Most falls under the "poorly mantained" category, for example CNAG (Copy Number Analyzer for GeneChip) that despite having an interesting DNA copy number estimation algorithm, from the software point of view it is terrible (hint: when a list of references is empty the program should output an error, not crash horribly). I won't even get started on CARAT", an algorithm that has been published without a working implementation...

Walking in a Webby Wonderland

Have you recently built a bioinformatics web application useful to the wider community that you'd like to tell the world about? Are you also looking to score brownie points for a rigourously peer-reviewed publication that stands a reasonable chance of being well cited? If that's you, then you have one month from today (December 1st) to sort your code out, and get your abstract in, for the fifth annual Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) Web Server issue published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in 2007. All articles in this issue are published under an open access model.