The NCIP is committed to advancing cancer research through improving biomedical informatics, and we believe that active participation by the broad community is the most effective way to accomplish this. To that end, we have made significant advances in our plan to engage the biomedical-research, informatics, and developer communities by lowering the barrier to community-driven software development.

In a previous blog post about NCIP’s plans to move into open-development published on July 26, 2012, Juli Klemm reflected on different ways for us to “get there from here.”  Since that time, we have made tremendous progress in driving our strategy forward and are excited to announce that we have tackled the main recommendation that came out of our June meeting with open-source thought leaders: Keep it simple. Make barriers to entry as low as possible, and reuse available resources. Specifically, we have adopted a software license that is approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and have begun to migrate the code developed under the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid^® (caBIG^®) Program to a public repository. Our goal in taking these steps is to remove as many barriers as possible to community participation in the continuing development of these assets.