Anatomy of BioJS, an open source community for the life sciences

Guy Yachdav; Tatyana Goldberg; Sebastian Wilzbach; David Dao; Iris Shih; Saket Choudhary; Steve Crouch; Max Franz; Alexander García; Leyla J García; Björn A Grüning; Devasena Inupakutika; Ian Sillitoe; Anil S Thanki; Bruno Vieira; José M Villaveces; Maria V Schneider; Suzanna Lewis; Steve Pettifer; Burkhard Rost; Manuel Corpas

doi:10.7554/eLife.07009

Anatomy of BioJS, an open source community for the life sciences

Elife. 2015 Jul 8:4:e07009. doi: 10.7554/eLife.07009.

Authors

Guy Yachdav¹, Tatyana Goldberg², Sebastian Wilzbach², David Dao², Iris Shih², Saket Choudhary³, Steve Crouch⁴, Max Franz⁵, Alexander García⁶, Leyla J García⁷, Björn A Grüning⁸, Devasena Inupakutika⁴, Ian Sillitoe⁹, Anil S Thanki¹⁰, Bruno Vieira¹¹, José M Villaveces¹², Maria V Schneider¹⁰, Suzanna Lewis¹³, Steve Pettifer¹⁴, Burkhard Rost¹, Manuel Corpas¹⁰

Affiliations

¹ Bioinformatik, Biosof LLC, Garching, Germany.
² Bioinformatik, Technische Universität München, Garching, Germany.
³ Molecular and Computational Biology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, United States.
⁴ Web and Internet Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom.
⁵ Banting and Best Department of Medical Research, Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
⁶ Linkingdata I/O LLC, Austin, United States.
⁷ European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
⁸ Bioinformatics Group, Department of Computer Science and Centre for Biological Systems Analysis, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.
⁹ Institute of Structure and Molecular Biology, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
¹⁰ The Genome Analysis Centre, Norwich, United Kingdom.
¹¹ School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom.
¹² Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Planegg, Germany.
¹³ Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, United States.
¹⁴ School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom.

Abstract

BioJS is an open source software project that develops visualization tools for different types of biological data. Here we report on the factors that influenced the growth of the BioJS user and developer community, and outline our strategy for building on this growth. The lessons we have learned on BioJS may also be relevant to other open source software projects.

Keywords: JavaScript; bioinformatics; community; computational biology; cutting edge; none; open source; systems biology; visualization.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Biological Science Disciplines / methods*
Computational Biology / methods*
Software*

Grants and funding

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.