We are excited to announce the publication of our work Nextflow enables reproducible computational workflows in Nature Biotechnology.
The article provides a description of the fundamental components and principles of Nextflow. We illustrate how the unique combination of containers, pipeline sharing and portable deployment provides tangible advantages to researchers wishing to generate reproducible computational workflows.
Reproducibility is a major challenge in today's scientific environment. We show how three bioinformatics data analyses produce different results when executed on different execution platforms and how Nextflow, along with software containers, can be used to control numerical stability, enabling consistent and replicable results across different computing platforms. As complex omics analyses enter the clinical setting, ensuring that results remain stable brings on extra importance.
Since its first release three years ago, the Nextflow user base has grown in an organic fashion. From the beginning it has been our own demands in a workflow tool and those of our users that have driven the development of Nextflow forward. The publication forms an important milestone in the project and we would like to extend a warm thank you to all those who have been early users and contributors.
We kindly ask if you use Nextflow in your own work to cite the following article: