Bioconductor Maintainer Validation

Bioconductor Package Maintainer Validation System

Bioconductor
Infrastructure
Developer Engagement
Policies and Procedures
Author
Published

June 15, 2026

Introduction

Bioconductor policies include being an active and reachable maintainer. Maintainer emails in the DESCRIPTION of packages often go stale as maintainers change positions. There is also a necessity to have maintainers opt into Bioconductor policies and procedures as they change over time.

We have created an application that utilizes AWS SES services to send periodic emails to maintainers to check if the endpoint is reachable and to send a verification opt-in of Bioconductor current policies and procedures and code of conduct once a year.

Photo of Email

Initial feedback is that this email is “spammy” and may be marked as such by institutions, but it is an initial attempt at compliance. We will look at altrenatives to emails like specialized maintainer account access at a future date.

Access to Information

The information is in a publicly accessible database. We do not recommend connecting directly to the webservice but instead using the accompanied Bioconductor R package BiocMaintainerApp. It provides a ShinyApp interface for querying Bioconductor package maintainers’ information.

Photo of ShinyApp

Thank you

We appreciate all maintainer compliance moving forward.

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