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Etc.: Happy 25th Anniversary Bioinformatics.org!
Submitted by J.W. Bizzaro; posted on Tuesday, June 27, 2023 (2 comments)
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Twenty-five years ago today, I created a website that would become Bioinformatics.org. So we consider this day to be the anniversary of our site!
The first project created on Bioinformatics.org was an Internet-distributed bioinformatics workflow management system (WfMS) called The Loci Project (later named Piper). Having started in 1998, the same year that Google was founded, Loci even predated the popular use of the term Grid computing.
Loci played a major role in the growth of Bioinformatics.org, as it grabbed the interest of many in the field for its novel ideas. Early contributors to Loci included myself, Gary Van Domselaar, David Lapointe, Pete St. Onge, Brad Chapman, Holly Miller, Jarl van Katwijk and Jean-Marc Valin.
Although Loci never reached a beta release, it was a proof-of-concept that has been repeatedly validated over the years with the development of many similar but unrelated projects.
In the early 2000s, Bioinformatics.org continued hosting Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, and membership grew at a rate of thousands per year. Some of the other people helping to grow the site included Mark Luo, Martin Kucej, Prashanth Survajhala, Dan Bolser, Paul Stothard, Damian Counsell, Joe Landman, Yong Huang and Jon Stewart.
From the very start, the mission of Bioinformatics.org was to bring the ideals of FOSS development to the field of bioinformatics. These developers in fact modeled the ideals after those of scientific collaboration. But at the turn of the century, the race between the public and private sectors in the Human Genome Project (HGP) left a lot of uncertainty about how commercial the field of bioinformatics would become.
In 2002, the co-founders of Bioinformatics.org sought to recognize those in the field who advocated for the use of FOSS and publishing in open access (OA) journals, and so they created the Benjamin Franklin Award. Nearly 20 members of the community have so far been given the award.
In 2004, we created our jobs forum. Since then, employers from academia/non-profit, industry and government have posted almost 7,000 positions, and it's still going strong!
In 2006, Bioinformatics.org created an online education program. As with Loci, it turned out to be prescient, as it predated the massive education websites that are so common today.
And so, we want to take this moment to thank all of the people who have made this possible, including our members and sponsors. We look forward to advancing and growing further in the years to come!
Edit: And a special thanks to our advisor, Ken Marx, my mentor and collaborator for many years!
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Happy 25th anniversary, bioinformatics.org!
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Thank you, Gary!
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