On the lifetime of bioinformatics web services.
Nucleic Acids Res
; 48(22): 12523-12533, 2020 12 16.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-33270886
ABSTRACT
Web services are used through all disciplines in life sciences and the online landscape is growing by hundreds of novel servers annually. However, availability varies, and maintenance practices are largely inconsistent. We screened the availability of 2396 web tools published during the past 10 years. All servers were accessed over 133 days and 318 668 index files were stored in a local database. The number of accessible tools almost linearly increases in time with highest availability for 2019 and 2020 (â¼90%) and lowest for tools published in 2010 (â¼50%). In a 133-day test frame, 31% of tools were always working, 48.4% occasionally and 20.6% never. Consecutive downtimes were typically below 5 days with a median of 1 day, and unevenly distributed over the weekdays. A rescue experiment on 47 tools that were published from 2019 onwards but never accessible showed that 51.1% of the tools could be restored in due time. We found a positive association between the number of citations and the probability of a web server being reachable. We then determined common challenges and formulated categorical recommendations for researchers planning to develop web-based resources. As implication of our study, we propose to develop a repository for automatic API testing and sustainability indexing.
Texto completo:
1
Coleções:
01-internacional
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Software
/
Disciplinas das Ciências Biológicas
/
Bases de Dados Factuais
/
Biologia Computacional
Tipo de estudo:
Guideline
Limite:
Humans
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Nucleic Acids Res
Ano de publicação:
2020
Tipo de documento:
Article
País de afiliação:
Alemanha
País de publicação:
ENGLAND
/
ESCOCIA
/
GB
/
GREAT BRITAIN
/
INGLATERRA
/
REINO UNIDO
/
SCOTLAND
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UK
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UNITED KINGDOM