EMBnet.journal

Editorial

EMBnet.journal is the official publication of EMBnet, a not-for-profit foundation and legal entity based in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. EMBnet.journal is peer reviewed and has a strong focus on articles that relate to the practical use of bioinformatics in solving scientific problems in the life sciences; it also keenly promotes articles relating to bioinformatics education and training, and hence accepts papers describing the production of teaching materials, data-sets, tutorials, etc., development of competency frameworks, new pedagogical approaches, technology-enhanced-learning systems, and so on.

The Journal also reports EMBnet’s activities, achievements and plans for the future. This volume publishes two interesting technical notes, and a report on the last EMBnet Annual General Meeting (AGM) and workshop, hosted in Oeiras (PT), from 10-12 June 2015. At this meeting, EMBnet delineated and agreed a new investment strategy, to be realised through a series of initiatives, including new projects to restyle EMBnet.journal and to support GOBLET in the development of high-quality training materials. The research article by Attwood et al. deserves special mention, as it touches on one of the most crucial issues of modern science-life research – that of the fragility of the databases in which we ’preserve’ the fruits of our scientific endeavours, and the threat their ephemeral nature poses to data diversity and scientific reproducibility (a challenge at the heart of major infrastructure initiatives like ELIXIR and BD2K).

Volume 21 also produced a Supplement disseminating the results of the last conference organised by the SeqAhead COST Action, dedicated to issues related to Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data analysis and storage.

This closing editorial of volume 21 looks forward to a future new-look volume 22, with a fully revised, enhanced layout. The editorial and technical teams behind the Journal have worked hard both on the layout design and on establishing new administrative routines, and will soon launch a PR campaign to expose more authors and readers to the ameliorated journal.

We hope that readers will appreciate the forthcoming journal improvements, and the editorial team warmly encourages the submission of new articles using our online publishing system.