Challenges and recommendations to improve the installability and archival stability of omics computational tools

by Serghei Mangul, Thiago Mosqueiro, Richard J. Abdill, Dat Duong, Keith Mitchell, Varuni Sarwal, Brian Hill, Jaqueline Brito, Russell Jared Littman, Benjamin Statz, Angela Ka-Mei Lam, Gargi Dayama, Laura Grieneisen, Lana S. Martin, Jonathan Flint, Eleazar Eskin, Ran Blekhman Developing new software tools for analysis of large-scale biological data is a key component of advancing modern biomedical research. Scientific reproduction of published findings requires running computational tools on data generated by such studies, yet little attention is presently allocated to the installability and archival stability of computational software tools. Scientific journals require data and code sharing, but none currently require authors to guarantee the continuing functionality of newly published tools. We have estimated the archival stability of computational biology soft ware tools by performing an empirical analysis of the internet presence for 36,702 omics software resources published from 2005 to 2017. We found that almost 28% of all resources are currently not accessible through uniform resource locators (URLs) published in the paper they first appeared in. Amon g the 98 software tools selected for our installability test, 51% were deemed “easy to install,” and 28% of the tools failed to be installed at all because of problems in the implementation. Moreover, for papers introducing new software, we found that the number of citations significantly increa sed when authors prov...
Source: PLoS Biology: Archived Table of Contents - Category: Biology Authors: Source Type: research