TrackNumberofDownloads

NIH has invested and continues to invest significant funding into the National Centers of Biomedical Computation, of which NAMIC is one. Consequently, the NIH is deeply interested in tracking the effectiveness of these investments. Evaluating the impact of research initiatives such as NAMIC is a difficult task. Typically agency sponsors must look to quantitative measures such as publications and references to published material. However, NAMIC also has a strong engineering role in the form of software. Thus NAMIC must also look to the impact of their investments on software systems supported by the NCBCs.

There are several approaches to monitoring software impact. The first is to insure that all software created under NAMIC is properly credits the support of the NCBC program. In NAMIC, this requires placing acknowledgement fields in file headers. Another approach is to track the number of downloads of software packages. And finally, in some cases registration may be required before software can be obtained.

While these approaches give a reasonable estimate of the impact of software on the biocomputing community, they are rough approximations at best. For example, the approaches described above do not count CVS (or SVN) source code revision control access. Also, since the code is open source, often it is downloaded once for a particular site, at which point a system adminstrator may install it across the sire for multiple users.