Several authors from DTL partners UMC Utrecht (Pjotr Prins, Edwin Cuppen) and UMCG (Ritsert Jansen), together with a.o. Phil Bourne (NIH) wrote an urgent plea in Nature Biotechnology for effective big biology software development. The authors stress the importance of acknowledging that software development is an integral part of research and not just an underpinning method. Projects and universities need to promote bioinformatics collaborations and create scientific rewards. Funding agencies can add institutional focus; emphasize collaborative free and open-source software (FOSS) projects like Galaxy; build on existing grassroots initiatives; create split funding streams for software and hardware; support maintenance of projects; encourage collaboration with experts in high-performance computing and software engineering; and fund larger projects dedicated to big biology software solutions.
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