Towards Advancing Research with Workflows: A perspective from the Workflows Community Summit -- Amsterdam, 2025
Irene Bonati, Silvina Caino-Lores, Tainã Coleman, Sagar Dolas, Sandro Fiore, Venkatesh Kannan, Marco Verdicchio, Sean R. Wilkinson, Rafael Ferreira da Silva
TL;DR
Scientific workflows are essential for orchestrating complex computations across distributed resources but face challenges in interoperability, sustainability, recognition, and policy barriers. The paper synthesizes findings from the Workflows Community Summit 2025 and presents action lines across technology, policy, and community to address these issues. It advocates formalizing workflow patterns, developing benchmarks, securing dedicated funding for application development, and fostering international collaboration and career pathways in workflow engineering. The proposed dual-track roadmap aims to create a sustainable, interoperable, and policy-aligned workflow ecosystem that accelerates reproducible scientific discovery.
Abstract
Scientific workflows have become essential for orchestrating complex computational processes across distributed resources, managing large datasets, and ensuring reproducibility in modern research. The Workflows Community Summit 2025, held in Amsterdam on June 6th, 2025, convened international experts to examine emerging challenges and opportunities in this domain. Participants identified key barriers to workflow adoption, including tensions between system generality and domain-specific utility, concerns over long-term sustainability of workflow systems and services, insufficient recognition for those who develop and maintain reproducible workflows, and gaps in standardization, funding, training, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. To address these challenges, the summit proposed action lines spanning technology, policy, and community dimensions: shifting evaluation metrics from raw computational performance toward measuring genuine scientific impact; formalizing workflow patterns and community-driven benchmarks to improve transparency, reproducibility, and usability; cultivating a cohesive international workflows community that engages funding bodies and research stakeholders; and investing in human capital through dedicated workflow engineering roles, career pathways, and integration of workflow concepts into educational curricula and long-term training initiatives. This document presents the summit's findings, beginning with an overview of the current computing ecosystem and the rationale for workflow-centric approaches, followed by a discussion of identified challenges and recommended action lines for advancing scientific discovery through workflows.