DISCONTINUATION_NOTICE.md

In romanhaa/cerebroApp: Interactive visualization of scRNA-seq data with Cerebro

Cerebro and cerebroApp are no longer in active development

It makes me sad (and slightly embarrassed) that Cerebro will likely follow the same path as so many other tools that have been developed by students and scientists in academia, i.e. no long-term support after publication. Ironically, in the beginning I was convinced to not even try publishing it at all.

The Cerebro project has been an incredible experience for me and it gave me so much more than a publication. It connected me to other communities, made me learn valuable skills (and aware of many others), and even served as a creative outlet.

Getting feedback from users was more satisfying than I had imagined. I want to thank you all for the support and suggestions that ultimately made Cerebro a better application. Your feedback was a major source of motivation to continue working on Cerebro for as long as I did. Yet, deciding to stop working on this project feels like letting you down, even if it's just a handful of users. But after leaving academia I no longer have the time to be the main developer and don't want to give somebody the false impression that they can expect bug fixes or new features in the future.

While, at the time of writing this, I still think that Cerebro does several things better than many of the other single cell data visualization tools out there, it cannot seriously compete in the long run without a set of core developers behind it. Nonetheless, I would love to see Cerebro/cerebroApp becoming a community effort and continue to serve its purpose of making data accessible.

Projects like Cerebro, especially in a fast-paced environment such as single cell omis, often reach a point where you wonder whether your time is more wisely spent, for the field as a whole, by making other tools better rather than pushing your own.

For those of you who still use Cerebro/cerebroApp and look for an alternative, I suggest checking out cellxgene, vitessce, or cirrocumulus. None of these are drop-in replacements but they have a solid community built around them.

romanhaa/cerebroApp documentation built on Nov. 25, 2021, 5:29 p.m.