ISMB 2015: BioinfoCoreWorkshop

Proposal

Our proposal for this year is that we would like to have a single unifying topic for the entire session, which would be "The evolving relationship between core facilities and researchers". This will be divided into sub-topics but each of these will look at how the role of core facilities is changing in response to the increased prevalence of bioinformatics knowledge within the wider research community, and the introduction of many more dedicated bioinformaticians into research groups. We hope this this discussion will attract people from both the core facility and research group side of the discussion as this changing relationship will affect both parties.

The more detailed structure will be broken down into four somewhat overlapping areas. Each of these will be introduced by a different speaker with a short presentation and will be followed by a moderated group discussion.

Topic 1: The role of core facilities when everyone is a bioinformatician

• Speaker : Davide Cittaro
• Moderators : Simon Andrews and Matthew Eldridge

Whilst bioinformatics used to be the preserve of dedicated bioinformaticians a modern research group will now often have a significant amount of bioinformatics expertise within its staff. This will range from wet lab biologists who would like to be responsible for the analysis of their own data to dedicated embedded bioinformaticians who can find enough work from the output of a single group to fill their time. In this environment the role played by core facilities must necessarily change. Their traditional role as the analysis hub for a set of research groups must give way to a broader view of how they can help to support the more diverse range of informatics activities happening within a research institution. This session will look at the ways in which different core facilities have adapted to these changes and try to look at how their role will change further in future.

Topic 2: Bioinformatics core facilities as service providers

• Speaker : Sven Nahnsen
• Moderators : Simon Andrews and Matthew Eldridge

One of the growing roles for core facilities is to act as central service providers for routine large scale analyses or data stores. In this session we will look at how much it is possible to automate routine analyses and how much of a standard analysis pipeline can be treated in this way. We will aim to go further though and explore how core facilities can remain relevant and stay on top of the latest developments rather than being constrained as high volume service providers.

Topic 3: Maintaining a publicly used analysis infrastructure

• Speaker : Madelaine Gogol
• Moderators : David Sexton and Brent Richter

When a large proportion of the research staff in an institution want to be able undertake bioinformatics analyses on large data sets it makes sense to have a centralised computing resource on which to run this, and the management of these resources is generally falling into the hands of bioinformatics core facilities. We will look here at the ways in which different sites have chosen to make their compute infrastructure more widely available, and how they have tackled the problems which this has thrown up.

Topic 4: The business of core services

• Speaker : Jim Cavalcoli
• Moderators : David Sexton and Brent Richter

Many core facilities operate on a cost recovery basis, and the most common method of recharging has been around the number of hours of analyst time spent working on specific projects. In an era where the core facility is less visible as a front line analysis service and spends more of its time maintaining infrastructure and services how do cores continue to recoup their costs. We will look at the different funding models which are being used and will discuss the fairest and least burdensome ways of recharging and how to communicate these costs to end users.