Towards Reproducible Bioinformatics: The OpenBio-C Scientific Workflow Environment

The highly competitive environment of post-genomics biomedical research is pushing towards the production of highly qualified results and their utilization in clinical practice. Due to this pressure, an important factor of scientific progress has been underestimated namely, the reproducibility of the results. To this end, it is critical to design and implement computational platforms that enable seamless and unhindered access to distributed bio-data, software and computational infrastructures. Furthermore, the need to support collaboration and form synergistic activities between the engaged researchers is also raised, as the mean to achieve consensus on respective scientific discoveries. The aforementioned needs and requirements underlie the motivations for the development of OpenBio-C workflow environment, and determine its fundamental objectives. The insufficiencies of current workflow editing and execution environments are explored, and the key-directions to advance over an environment that supports reproducibility are stated. The basic components and functionality of the OpenBio-C initial implementation (beta version) are detailed.