This is a long-standing problem in the field of computational biology and I’m sure almost every user has experienced such scenario: you follow a link from a journal article (which has been published 2-3 years backwards) to an online database or software; either the webpage does not exist anymore or the tool is not properly functional! Certainly you feel frustrated specially when you’re urgently in need of that functionality for your research. But why is it so?
There are hundreds, if not thousands, software programs and data repositories which have been developed for specific research topics or applicability but have been left without being extended to novel applications or being updated. In the era of integrative bioinformatics and systems biology, one needs to integrate data from existing resources efficiently; thus any inconsistency in the content as well as performance of these resources could lead to misleading results.
Philip E. Bourne and his colleagues from University of California San Diego, La Jolla, have brought this issue forward in their commentary at PLoS Computational Biology entitled Computational Biology Resources Lack Persistence and Usability.
At the end, they ask: “Wouldn’t it seem that evidence of usability through suitable documentation and accessibility should be prerequisite to publishing a paper when that paper is about such a resource? Is our integrity being compromised by the resources we are making public?”
Personally, I think the solution of this problem could be quality control, monitoring, and maintenance of bioinformatics resources by a third party organization.
What do you think?