nodalpoint.org - Source Code for Biology and Medicine - Comments

Documentation

chris — Wed, 17 May 2006 12:35:26 -0400

And as a side effect, we might get decent docs on more code...

A great initiative

Neil — Sat, 13 May 2006 09:21:19 -0400

This is great - I hope very much that it succeeds. There must be many bioinformatics hackers who have useful bits of code sitting in cvs repositories and as Pedro says, perhaps this will provide incentive to clean it up and get it out there.

I think it's also recognition that what we do is worthy. Lately I've been concerned that in research, it can be difficult for people whose main focus is programming to convert their daily labour into something that other scientists take seriously (i.e. publications). Perhaps this is an avenue for more recognition of those efforts.

about time

pansapiens — Sat, 13 May 2006 02:09:50 -0400

I've always felt that providing source code should be a requirement of publication in existing biomedical journals ... after all, 'wet' lab scientists are typically required by most respectable journals to lodge all new sequences or structure coordinates in the relevant public database prior to publication. Many also require authors to send any vector (eg plasmid) used in the publication to others who request it (although it is amazing how often plasmids are 'lost'). Why has this never been the case for source code ?

Source Code for Biology and Medicine

PedroBeltrao — Fri, 12 May 2006 05:06:48 -0400

(Via chem-bla-ics and Yakafon) BioMed Central will be hosting a new journal entitled "Source Code for Biology and Medicine". According to journal description: Source Code for Biology and Medicine aims to publish source code for distribution and use in the public domain in order to advance biological and medical research. Through this dissemination, it may be possible to shorten the time required for solving certain computational problems for which there is limited source code availability or resources.