Search, adapt, and reuse: the future of scientific workflows

International audienceOver the last years, a number of scientific workflow management systems (SciWFM) have been brought to a state of maturity that should permit their usage in a production-style environment. This is especially true for the Life Sciences, but SciWFM also attract con-siderable attention in fields like geophysics or climate research. These developments, accompanied by the growing availability of analytical tools wrapped as (web) services, were driven by a series of very interesting promises: End users will be empowered to develop their own pipelines; reuse of services will be enhanced by easier integration into custom workflows; time necessary for developing analysis pipelines will decrease; etc. But despite all efforts, SciWFM have not yet found widespread acceptance in their intended audience. In this paper, we argue that a wider adoption of SciWFM will only be achieved if the focus of research and development is shifted from methods for developing and running work¬flows to searching, adapting, and reusing existing workflows. Only by this shift can SciWFM outreach to the mass of domain scientists actually performing scientific analysis - and with little interest in developing them themselves. To this end, SciWFM need to be combined with community-wide workflow repositories allowing users to find solutions for their scientific needs (coded as a work¬flow). In this vision paper, we show how and where such developments have already started and highlight new research questions arising