Hackathons as a means of accelerating scientific discoveries and knowledge transfer
- Amel Ghouila1,9,10,
- Geoffrey Henry Siwo2,3,9,
- Jean-Baka Domelevo Entfellner4,5,9,10,
- Sumir Panji6,9,10,
- Katrina A. Button-Simons7,
- Sage Zenon Davis7,
- Faisal M. Fadlelmola8,10,
- The DREAM of Malaria Hackathon Participants11,
- Michael T. Ferdig7 and
- Nicola Mulder6,10
- 1Institut Pasteur de Tunis, LR11IPT02, Laboratory of Transmission, Control and Immunobiology of Infections (LTCII), 1002 Tunis-Belvédère, Tunisia;
- 2IBM Research Africa, 2001, Johannesburg, South Africa;
- 3Center for Research Computing, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, USA;
- 4South African National Bioinformatics Institute/Medical Research Council of South Africa Bioinformatics Unit, University of the Western Cape, Bellville 7535, Cape Town, South Africa;
- 5Computer Science Department, University of the Western Cape, Bellville 7535, Cape Town, South Africa;
- 6Computational Biology Division, Department of Integrative Biomedical Sciences, Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, University of Cape Town, 7925, Cape Town, South Africa;
- 7Eck Institute for Global Health, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, 43556, USA;
- 8Centre for Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, Faculty of Science, University of Khartoum, Khartoum 321, and Future University of Sudan, Khartoum, 10553, Sudan
Abstract
Scientific research plays a key role in the advancement of human knowledge and pursuit of solutions to important societal challenges. Typically, research occurs within specific institutions where data are generated and subsequently analyzed. Although collaborative science bringing together multiple institutions is now common, in such collaborations the analytical processing of the data is often performed by individual researchers within the team, with only limited internal oversight and critical analysis of the workflow prior to publication. Here, we show how hackathons can be a means of enhancing collaborative science by enabling peer review before results of analyses are published by cross-validating the design of studies or underlying data sets and by driving reproducibility of scientific analyses. Traditionally, in data analysis processes, data generators and bioinformaticians are divided and do not collaborate on analyzing the data. Hackathons are a good strategy to build bridges over the traditional divide and are potentially a great agile extension to the more structured collaborations between multiple investigators and institutions.
Footnotes
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[Supplemental material is available for this article.]
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Article published online before print. Article, supplemental material, and publication date are at http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.228460.117.
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Freely available online through the Genome Research Open Access option.
- Received August 1, 2017.
- Accepted March 22, 2018.
This article, published in Genome Research, is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution 4.0 International), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
