Life sciences want bioinformatics, but not so much e-infrastructure?

During the Queenstown Molecular Biology satellite meeting on bioinformatics, Jeremy Barker, CEO of Queensland Facility for Advanced Bioinformatics (QFAB), presented the results of a survey of wishes of 165 respondents (to be found on the SP Consulting website).

Here’s a synopsis of the results from the survey ’targeted members of the life-science community’:

• 47.3% (n = 129) consider that the development of e-infrastructures is a priority in bioinformatics.
• 75.7% (n = 140) consider new methods and programs important (confusingly, the summary of these results refer to development in bioinformatics resources).
• 84.6% (n = 149) consider the development of data standards important.
• 79.2% (n = 144) consider development of bioinformatics initial and continuing education important (given as ‘bioinformatics diffusion knowledge’!).
• 86.7% (n = 143) consider increasing the quality and number of interactions between developers and users important.

I’m not familiar with the details of how the survey participants were recruited, etc., but I’m not especially surprised by the latter responses. I imagine most people interested in using bioinformatics would rank the latter four as important.

What I think is interesting is the comparative lack of interest in e-infrastructures compared to new developments in research bioinformatics.

Thoughts?

Other articles on Code for life:

Developing bioinformatics methods: by who and how

Research project coding v. end-user application coding

New bioinformatics journal — EMBnet.journal

Not Darwin’s tree of life

Literate and test-driven programming (in bioinformatics)

Keeping the serendipity