What we do

myExperiment is a collaborative environment where scientists can safely publish their workflows and in silico experiments, share them with groups and find those of others. Workflows, other digital objects and bundles (called Packs) can now be swapped, sorted and searched like photos and videos on the Web. Unlike Facebook or MySpace, myExperiment fully understands the needs of the researcher and makes it really easy for the next generation of scientists to contribute to a pool of scientific methods, build communities and form relationships — reducing time-to-experiment, sharing expertise and avoiding reinvention. myExperiment is now the largest public repository of scientific workflows.

Using myExperiment

You can find workflows here; myExperiment has many different types of workflows, such as Taverna, Galaxy, Rapid Miner, Bio Extract, and Kepler. You can also share your workflows and their supporting files, either with your colleagues or with the wider world, or even make packs that group together related workflows and files, allowing people to download a whole body of work with a single click.

Of course, you can also find the other people on myExperiment, and create and join groups of people to collaborate. We also support tagging of workflows and files, and you can even review others' contributions right here on myExperiment.

Case Study: Bioinformatics

The eIUS Project highlights the successful use of e-Infrastructure, in this case by researchers in Bioinformatics at the University of Manchester who, in collaboration with the myGrid Consortium, use the Taverna Workbench and the myExperiment virtual research environment to assist with the analysis and sharing of data relating to sleeping sickness (Trypanosomiasis) in African cattle.

In this case study, myExperiment is used as a collaboration platform, enabling the sharing of the workflows that describe the in silico experiments, together with both the input data files that the workflows use and the result analyses produced. The overall experiment was performed within the context of a private myExperiment group, allowing rapid sharing of the experimental artifacts while assuring everyone that nothing would be released to the wider public until the publications in conferences and journals were accepted.

The eIUS Project was funded by the JISC and supported by the University of Oxford and University of Manchester.

Citing myExperiment

If you use myExperiment in your research, please cite us and let us know so we can cite you:

• If you are citing myExperiment in a computer science context, please use: De Roure, D., Goble, C. and Stevens, R. (2009) The Design and Realisation of the myExperiment Virtual Research Environment for Social Sharing of Workflows. Future Generation Computer Systems 25, pp. 561-567. doi:10.1016/j.future.2008.06.010
• If you are citing myExperiment in a domain context (for example life-sciences), please use: Goble, C.A., Bhagat, J., Aleksejevs, S., Cruickshank, D., Michaelides, D., Newman, D., Borkum, M., Bechhofer, S., Roos, M., Li, P., and De Roure, D.: myExperiment: a repository and social network for the sharing of bioinformatics workflows, Nucl. Acids Res., 2010. doi:10.1093/nar/gkq429

Please keep us informed — our hashtag is #myexperiment

Statistics

myExperiment has nearly 10,000 members, 370 groups, 2700 workflows, 860 files and 360 packs.

Acknowledgements

myExperiment was brought to you by a joint team from the universities of Southampton, Manchester and Oxford in the UK, led by David De Roure and Carole Goble.

myExperiment was supported by three European Commission 7th Framework Programme (FP7) projects: BioVeL (Grant no. 283359), SCAPE (Grant no. 270137), and the Wf4Ever Project (Grant no. 270192) as well as the e-Research South and myGrid EPSRC Platform grants.

Previously, myExperiment was funded by JISC and the Microsoft Technical Computing Initiative.