CCL: Where can you publish articles on software?

["Ivanciuc, Ovidiu I." <oiivanci() UTMB.EDU>]

 Sent to CCL by: "Ivanciuc, Ovidiu I." [oiivanci]_[UTMB.EDU]
 >>>You can spend weeks and months to produce complicated
 >>>programmes of general interest, it does not mean that
 >>>it should be published in a scientific journal.
 This misconception might explain why chemistry is well
 behind biology in terms of number of free software,
 Web servers, and databases.
 Software and database notes are regularly published in
 high-impact biology journals: Bioinformatics (Impact Factor=5.742),
 BMC Bioinformatics (IF=5.42), Nucleic Acids Research (IF=7.26).
 Each year, Nucleic Acids Research has a special issue for
 databases (see 2005 Database Issue,
 http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/vol33/suppl_1/index.dtl)
 and another one for Web servers (see Web Server Issue 2005,
 http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/vol33/suppl_2/index.dtl).
 Updates for databases (GenBank, PDB, SwissProt) or major
 bioinformatics software are regularly published, and the rule
 is to cite the most recent publication when using a database
 or a software (such as alignment tools, Web servers).
 The recent trend in computational biology is to move in
 areas traditionally belonging to computational chemistry.
 An example: NIH started PubChem, a database of organic compounds
 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pcsubstance).
 Very instructive was the answer from the American Chemical Society:
 ACS asked the Congress to cut the funding for PubChem, because
 it is a public project that competes with a private one (CAS).
 If the chemical community wants useful and free software, then it should
 accept papers on software.
 For the moment, the best advice is to find a potential
 application to a biological problem and publish the
 software in Bioinformatics or other similar journals.
 Regards,
 Ovidiu