The Cancer Community and the Open Source Community

Meeting the challenge of creating robust and useful tools to support these rapidly evolving needs requires an open and collaborative approach to software development. The ability to modify software to support new data types is required, to analyze data using state of the art algorithms, and to integrate data in novel ways to support correlative studies. The tools need to be able to evolve as rapidly as the science they support and they should be readily shared so that the broader community has access to innovative tools, thus benefiting the entire cancer research enterprise.

In response to these critical needs, the NCI’s caBIG program was launched in 2003 with the goal of building a biomedical informatics network to allow cancer researchers to collaborate more effectively, particularly with regard to the meaningful exchange of information. The key principles of the program are: open source, open access, open development and federation. Of these four principles, the first three pertain to the informatics tools developed through the program whereby the code is freely available to anyone to view, alter, and redistribute without restriction, and the development processes themselves are performed in a completely transparent and participatory manner. Since its inception, over 70 tools have been developed and enhanced through the caBIG program and perhaps more importantly, a community of bioinformaticians across the biomedical research enterprise has formed with the common goal of working together to improve cancer research through a collaborative information network.