Our work is focused on three main pillars: sharing, training and networking.

We are witnessing an exponential increase in the creation of new bioinformatics tools, workflows, R packages, and Docker images, amongst others. To ensure a sustainable evolution, we need to organise, enable transparency, reproducibility, and proper dissemination of new bioinformatics applications. This will also contribute to open access to data, through the development and sharing of applications that enable the visualization and user-friendly analysis of public and own datasets, capable of running in any work environment and to be used by scientists with limited computational expertise.

We provide tutorials, including narrated “How to” videos, and best-practice guidelines for either using or sharing bioinformatics tools. These materials are being designed not only for beginners/non-experienced users, but also for more advanced users of the Bioinformatics global toolkit.

Moreover, we plan to organise hands-on (introductory) courses, workshops, and other activities to offer additional training opportunities for iMMers, especially those on the wet-lab side who want to have the basic training for running standard analyses on their data.

Networking is not just a formal word to justify social events… Bioinformaticians need to get to know each other not only to have opportunities to share experiences and expertise that working in different labs does not usually trigger.

We also believe that knowledge is power. Collaborations between wet-lab and dry-lab researchers are easier when they speak [almost] the same language. We will help to break the ice, and the rest is up to you!

• Transparency: all of our featured tools are open source, making their adaptation to other relevant tasks straight forward.

• Reproducibility: we promote the sharing of metadata, analysis pipelines, and workflows to help mitigate the replication crisis of scientific studies.

• Responsibility: we make sure that our featured tools comply with standard criteria for good performance, through manual testing and curation.

• Respect for authorship: we help to share bioinformaticians’ work with the scientific community, while assisting in the dissemination and exposure of their intellectual ownership, making sure appropriate authorship credit is given online and in scientific publications.

• Teamwork: we value direct contributions to our project, from people with diverse scientific and technical backgrounds.

Our vision is for Bioinformatics Matters to be a reference meeting point for the iMM and national scientific communities with interests in active development and sharing of bioinformatics tools and analysis workflows, as well as in training on their applications.

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