FUCHS@embl.bitnet ("Rainer Fuchs ", EMBL) (02/14/90)
I include an extract of a mail message that I received the other day from a Spanish scientist, Ricardo Sachez Carmenes. I think that his proposal can serve as a good starting point for an interesting discussion. Rainer Fuchs, Ph.D. EMBL Data Library fuchs@embl.bitnet > I also have a few more small utility programs already develloped > or being devellopped that might be useful to others. I have just had an > idea that could benefit both bench molecular biologists and computer > molecular biologists. Some of ours spend long hours making small or big > pieces of software that help making life easier to bench scientists. > Sometimes these pieces of software might be useful to many, but do not > justify by themselves a full article on a ordinary molecular biology > journal. You might argue that CABIOS is there for that, but what I am > thinking of is in an alternative way of making programs public (that is, > publishing them and making them promptly available to others). I think > that everytime a new algorythm method is devellopped, it should be > published following the ordinary way, but in many other cases the tools > being devellopped could benefit of a different "publication" procedure. > Many of these pieces of software just stay in the lab where they were > devellopped because of the lack of a mean and / or a stimulus to be > published. > > I would like to make an informal proposal of setting a sort of > "electronic scientific journal", based on the EMBL server as a very > appropriated link between European molecular biologists. The aim of such > "journal" could be "publishing" molecular biology software tools submitted > for "publication". Some kind of selection procedure ("referees") should be > settled to select what is worth and what is not. Those submissions that > would pass the selection procedure would go to the software server, together > with a short text (in the style of a short paper or short communication) > describing the pogram included. At some kind of regular intervals, and index > of the newly accepted "articles" could be sent to other similar servers in > the world and to Current Contents and the like. > > This kind of "electronic scientific journal" would allow select > pieces of software that are worth to be made available, and would simulta- > neously allow a kind of formal publication of these kind of work. Obviously > this would be intended only for computer scientists or molecular biology > scientists making pieces of software useful in molecular biology or the > like, and made freelly available provided they users properly reference > their use; commercial pieces of software or pieces of software that are > not to be made freelly available would be, from my point of vue, excluded > from these scheme.
smith@mcclb0.med.nyu.edu (02/14/90)
In article <9002131921.AA00110@net.bio.net>, FUCHS@embl.bitnet ("Rainer Fuchs ", EMBL) writes: > I include an extract of a mail message that I received the other day from a > Spanish scientist, Ricardo Sachez Carmenes. >> >> I would like to make an informal proposal of setting a sort of >> "electronic scientific journal", based on the EMBL server as a very >> appropriated link between European molecular biologists. The aim of such >> "journal" could be "publishing" molecular biology software tools submitted >> for "publication". Some kind of selection procedure ("referees") should be >> settled to select what is worth and what is not. Those submissions that >> would pass the selection procedure would go to the software server, together >> with a short text (in the style of a short paper or short communication) >> describing the pogram included. At some kind of regular intervals, and index >> of the newly accepted "articles" could be sent to other similar servers in >> the world and to Current Contents and the like. This sounds like a moderated newsgroup to me, not a bad idea. If this is actually done, I think there need to be a few basic rules about the code: people should be prepared to put aside their preconceptions about the type of system everyone else 'should' have be it UNIX/VMS/MAC/IBM-PC, and prepare stuff that could be successfully ported to any reasonable environment. +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Ross Smith, Cell Biology, NYU Medical Center, 550 First Ave., NYC, 10016| |Phone: (212) 340-5356: FAX: (212) 340-8139 (Alternate NYUMC) (212) 340-7190| |E-Mail: SMITH@NYUMED.BITNET (BITNET), SMITH@MCCLB0.MED.NYU.EDU (Internet)| +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+