## 5 Discussion  
Although BTA is a crucial component in modern science, we argue that many widely known ROs that comprise BTA workflows are far from being FAIR; namely, ontologies, tools, and corpora have serious shortcomings that prevent them from taking place in reproducible analyses. These shortcomings are associated with a lack of ease in downloading, installing, configuring, and using them. It is obvious that the degree to which one can perform these tasks significantly affects the ability of these ROs to take part in arbitrary analysis workflows. The utilization of untested ontologies, the use of computer languages from external (to the one used to build the workflow) execution environments, and scaling up in modern high-performance computational platforms are some of the challenges to be addressed [2]. This paper presents an effort to \"FAIRify\" some of the most well-known ROs in BTA through the use of the OpenBio.eu platform. This effort follows the principle that ROs should be rendered directly downloadable, installable, and re-usable. Moreover, tools, web services, corpora, and ontologies should all lie in a common repository, properly categorized and indexed. Researchers should be able to reuse these components by simply \"plugging\" them into an analysis workspace and should also be able to create personal copies (forks) of them to apply any change that they like. Finally, ROs should be rateable and comment-able. Moreover, users should be able to perform these activities with simple web actions (such as drag-and-drop) without having to use any DSL. In Table 1, we present how the architecture of OpenBio.eu addresses and implements all official FAIR guidelines [21]. Of course, this is a subjective evaluation of the platform's FAIR-ness status. Actual FAIR metrics can be achieved either by conducting user surveys or by using automatic FAIR validation mechanisms [60]. We intend to also provide these additional validations in a future study. Perhaps the most significant challenge for open source and social platforms of this kind is achieving long-term survivability. Platforms that have achieved this (i.e., Galaxy and Nextflow) owe it to several qualitative characteristics such as a clear data model, solid implementation, and the use of modern underlying IT technologies. Here, we showcased how OpenBio.eu fulfills these characteristics. Moreover, these criteria are not adequate to guarantee widespread adoption unless the platform sufficiently tackles a \"real and existing problem.\" Here, we demonstrated that the current un-FAIR status of many ROs in BTA is a real problem that needs to be tackled. Finally, the permissive open-source license is another factor that can contribute to the long-term survivability of the project. Overall, there are more than 100 projects with similar functionality and scope ([[https://github.com/pditommaso/awesome-pipeline](https://github.com/pditommaso/awesome-pipeline)]([https://github.com/pditommaso/awesome-pipeline](https://github.com/pditommaso/awesome-pipeline)), accessed on 11 October 2021). We hope that these characteristics will help OpenBio.eu to stand out. For the purpose of this study, we have added a variety of ROs for the task of BTA. These ROs are far from perfect and may need refinement. Moreover, crucial and widely used corpora, ontologies, and tools are missing. Our future work will include not only the expansion of this collection but also the creation of workflows that efficiently compare them. Toward this end, OpenBio.eu can be used to create meta-workflows that install, configure, and measure the efficiency of other workflows. Another future work is to compare the ability of modern high-performance environments to sufficiently scale these ROs, so as to process the entire corpus of open biomedical documents and measure the effect of managing this information overload. Of course, the most challenging future work is to persuade the open-source and bioinformatics community to contribute to this project, either by importing new ROs or by improving the platform.