Introduction
The nf-core project is a diverse project spread across many groups. Here you can read how we organise ourselves, how we are funded and how the nf-core project was started.
Please note that all nf-core community members are expected to adhere to our code of conduct.
Financial support
The vast majority of nf-core development is done as a labour of love, on a voluntary basis. Most of all, we would like to thank all contributors (and their employers!). You form the lifeblood of nf-core and we are eternally grateful for your time and efforts.
A number of projects and grants list nf-core as collaborators and also contribute to our community (see Projects we are involved with). If you work with a project that would benefit from an explicit link with nf-core, please let us know.
Finally, we would specifically like to acknowledge and thank the following sponsors who help to support the project:
Seqera
Seqera is the leading provider of open source workflow orchestration software needed for data pipeline processing, cloud infrastructure, and secure collaboration.
Seqera is the company behind Nextflow and has supported the nf-core community since its inception.
Specifically, Seqera helps nf-core with:
- Event organisation and costs
- Website hosting
- Employment of numerous major contributors
- A Seqera Cloud Pro account for launching and managing full-size release tests
- Providing and maintaining Nextflow! ✨
SciLifeLab NGI
The nf-core community was founded with pipelines from the SciLifeLab National Genomics Infrastructure (NGI). The NGI continues to support nf-core across a number of fronts:
- Funding a part time position for organisational support, covering organisation of bytesize talks and other outreach (@FranBonath, Franziska Bonath)
- Paying for the renewal fees of the nf-core Slack
- Involvement in the steering group and grant writing
SciLifeLab Data Centre
The SciLifeLab Data Centre supports nf-core with funding from the SciLifeLab & Wallenberg National Program for Data-Driven Life Science. This funding covers a full-time position (@mashehu, Matthias Hörtenhuber) to work on maintainance of nf-core framework code. For example, the nf-core website and the nf-core/tools package.
Centre for Genomic Regulation
Nextflow was initially written at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Cedric Notredame’s group. Cedric’s group supports nf-core by funding a position with 50% time spent on core infrastructure development (@mirpedrol, Júlia Mir Pedrol).
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services (AWS) kindly support nf-core with cloud compute credits to run each nf-core analysis pipeline with full-size benchmark datasets on every release. You can explore and download these pipeline results under the Results tab on each pipeline page.
AWS also hosts the AWS-iGenomes resource on the Registry of Open Data on AWS.
This is used by most nf-core pipelines to give free and open access to the reference genomes of over 30 species, by using a simple --genome key when running a pipeline.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure also kindly supports nf-core with cloud compute credits to run each nf-core analysis pipeline with full-size benchmark datasets on every release. You will soon be able to explore and download these pipeline results on the nf-core website, on each pipeline page.
Past support
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a great supporter of scientific open-source software. We are very grateful to them for supporting nf-core and Nextflow with several grants through their Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS) grants:
The grants were awarded for the period of 2022-2024. Amongst other things, the CZI EOSS grant money enabled the nf-core community to:
- Hire a dedicated coordinator / safety officer (50%)
- Hire a dedicated developer for nf-core (50%)
- Cover operational costs, such as our Slack subscription fees
- Organise events, such as hackathons
- Run organised mentorship programmes
- Hiring local community advocates from geographical areas where we currently lack representation
The CZI grant employed personnel based at the SciLifeLab National Genomics Infrastructure, the Quantitative Biology Center in Tübingen Germany, and Seqera.
Open source support
We also thank the following organisations for supporting nf-core through providing us ‘open source plans’ of their services:
History of nf-core
The nf-core project came about at the start of 2018 when Phil Ewels (@ewels) was the head of the development facility at NGI Stockholm (National Genomics Infrastructure), part of SciLifeLab in Sweden.
The NGI had been developing analysis pipelines for use with it’s genomics data for several years and started using a set of standards for each pipeline created. This helped other people run the pipelines on their own systems; typically Swedish research groups at first, but later on other groups and core genomics facilities too such as QBIC in Tübingen, Germany.
As the number of users and contributors grew, the pipelines began to outgrow the SciLifeLab and NGI branding. To try to open up the effort into a truly collaborative project, nf-core was created and all relevant pipelines moved to this new nf-core GitHub Organisation.
The very early days of nf-core were greatly shaped by Alex Peltzer (@apeltzer), Sven Fillinger (@sven1103) and Andreas Wilm (@andreas-wilm). Without them, the project would not exist.