Too many tools to choose from? Help us promote our guidelines and accompanying practical guide for encouraging the community to collaboratively develop fewer, better and FAIRer software in RNA bioinformatics!
Advances in experimental methodologies used in RNA research have led to an explosion in data volumes and corresponding analysis tools and workflows alike, with dozens of software choices being available for tasks such as single cell sequencing analysis or the estimation of transcript expression from RNA-Seq data. Apart from the sheer amount of available software, the way in which academic research is conducted, with severe time constraints and a quick turnover of personnel that rarely consists of trained developers, severely exacerbates the situation: code bases are not maintained, badly documented, untested and/or not made publicly available. Consequently, end users find it difficult to decide which software to use and new software has a hard time penetrating a crowded market. We propose to challenge this situation with the FAIR-RNA manifesto, a set of guidelines that aims to concentrate resources on the development of fewer, higher-quality tools with broad community support.
- Manifesto
- Practical guide
- Survey for software users and developers (coming soon...)
- Examples of compliant software (coming soon...)
FAIR-RNA is a community effort. The more people behind it, the more people we will reach. Learn how to get involved.
The following resources, listed in alphabetical order, have been a great inspiration for us. We fully support all of these initiatives and urge people to support them:
- 4OSS Recommendations
- FAIR Principles
- FAIR Principles for Research Software
- The Small Tools Manifesto for Bioinformatics
The FAIR-RNA manifesto adopts a versioning scheme that is inspired by Semantic Versioning. Major, minor and patch versions have the following meaning:
- Major version change: Manifesto guidelines have been modified.
- Minor version change: Other parts of the manifesto (e.g., the preamble or the guideline annotations) have been changed.
- Patch version change: Any other resource has been modified.
Note that the versioning scheme will only come into effect once version 1.0.0 is released. Up until that point, the manifesto and other resources are to be considered as beta releases.
In alphabetical order:
- Angela Chan
- Matthew Crum
- Christina Herrmann
- Alex Kanitz
- Brenda Miao
- Kimberly Olney
- Mathieu Quesnel-Vallières
- Joël Simoneau
We would like to thank the following organizations and people:
- hackseq for giving us a chance to kick-start the project during the [2020 hackseqRNA event][hackseq-rna].
- the iRNA-COSI network for hosting and supporting the project.
- Melissa Wilson, Arizona State University, for agreeing to help us gaining IRB approval for using our survey results.
- Mihaela Zavolan, University of Basel, and Yoseph Barash, University of Pennsylvania, for their continued support of the project