The Genome Analysis Centre - News

"Held in our new training suite part-funded by BBSRC, the interactive workshop brings together both researchers and non-researchers from different life science fields with one common interest: open science and reproducibility. Openness not only exists in terms of publications and data, but can be applied to the research process itself. More than ever, given the magnitude of data in bioinformatics, the ability to adopt best practice in workflows, standards, tools for data storage and sharing as well as its analysis, is imperative to making progress in science discovery. Researchers require clear and accessible mechanisms to share methods, data, processes, annotations and protocols. The era of cyber infrastructure brings great opportunities for sharing and enhancing this collaboration among the life sciences community. After sequencing the human genome, much time and money was spent on the development of bioinformatics approaches needed to harvest the wealth of genetic information. AllBio aims to adapt and transfer these human-genome-related computational technologies to the fields of microbial, plant and livestock science. The workshop focused on themes such as the use of standards to facilitate tool and data interoperation, sharing and re-use, and how these can feed into the creation of robust frameworks and guidelines to help foster and promote reproducible research and open science - a particular case study was built around Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) best practice. With contributions from a variety of stakeholders (including journal editors, researchers, data scientists and project managers), the discussions were lively and varied, and highlighted the need for training at all levels of the ‘open research life cycle’ ..."