Discussing how your project will be managed should provide you with peace of mind that the project will be delivered on schedule and that you will be kept informed as the project progresses. At the Genecontact will have a dedicated project manager looking after your project and liaising with you whenever necessary. A project manager will ensure that project resources are optimally allocated to keep your project on schedule and that quality assurance and documentation processes take place when they should. If, however, it becomes apparent that you would be working solely with an individual bioinformatician you should consider this a riskier endeavour as one-person bioinformatics providers with multiple clients and strains on their resources may have more difficulty delivering on schedule.

You are relying on your bioinformatics partner for their expertise and that should extend to discussing their results with you. Always check that your provider plans to have a bioinformatician discuss the report with you as this will give you a chance to make sure you fully understand all of the information that has been provided and ask any questions necessary. Reviewing the results is the most important part of your project and without a bioinformatician’s help to interpret them, the value of the results will be limited.

It is worth asking if your provider can provide results in a range of formats so you know if results can be provided in a format you prefer for publishing or a format that you are able to edit using tools you are familiar with.

The type and format of all output information data should be discussed already in the basic contracts and protocols phase. We adapt the expectations to the needs of the customers, so of course we can modify the interpretations or the data outputs even during the projects.

If you are paying for their analysis services, the answer should be ‘No’. However, if you feel that the provider’s contribution was a key element for the paper you may wish to ask them to coauthor. For less significant contributions you may consider including your provider in the acknowledgments section of your paper.