Galaxy Australia leads 2024 Galaxy Project publication
The latest developments in the Galaxy platform have been captured in a definitive publication describing the popular international data analysis platform. Lead author and Project Lead of Galaxy Australia, Dr Gareth Price, coordinated the paper that documents the key features supporting accessible, reproducible, and transparent user-driven research.
Gareth was proud that The Galaxy platform for accessible, reproducible, and collaborative data analyses: 2024 update highlighted several key features that will particularly benefit Australian researchers:
“One exciting new offering is Galaxy Australia’s Genome Lab, which presents a customised, user-friendly view with rapid access to a range of sophisticated resources tailored for genome researchers. Our locally developed features are now available for researchers around the world to use.”
Galaxy Project spans the globe, with over 500,000 individuals registering an account across the 19 years of operation. It is a collaborative community of dedicated contributors, working to constantly improve the service while following core values of supporting accessible, reproducible, and transparent user-driven research.
Leading the biennial Galaxy Project publication in the 2024 edition of the Nucleic Acids Research’s annual Web Server Issue was a rewarding experience for Gareth:
“It was a privilege to lead such an impactful publication that now becomes the citable entity for any researchers using Galaxy, particularly after the 2022 publication had 490 citations and over 16,000 views in only two years. And what a wonderful opportunity to collate Galaxy’s progress through the contributions of over 120 authors globally and their efforts in feature development for Galaxy users.”
In all, 19 Australians contributed to the paper, representing the important input of Galaxy Australia to the global research community. The Galaxy Australia team has been instrumental in delivering service optimisations like the Total Perspective Vortex, and feedback from Australian users has driven user experience improvements internationally.
The publication also highlights the addition of licensed bioinformatics tools Fgenesh++ and Cell Ranger to Galaxy. These powerful software packages are fully subsidised for Australian researchers to use, and through their enthusiastic use, the Galaxy team hope to build a body of evidence that encourages software developers to consider providing both open and commercial licensing options to meet researchers’ needs. Further improvements across user accessibility, self-guided training via the Galaxy Training Network, and back-end technical aspects to ensure jobs continue to run smoothly are also detailed in the publication.
Galaxy continues to evolve based on the needs of the open research community. With the release of this publication, and many new features to explore, there’s never been a better time to get started using Galaxy!