bio.tools: an expanded web service for research software in the life sciences

Computational methods are central to the life sciences. The rapid growth and diversification of software tools and databases make it difficult to find, compare, and reuse methods for a given task. bio.tools is a community-driven registry designed to improve the visibility of research software and allow researchers to simplify access to the software ecosystem through structured, interoperable, and accessible metadata. Tools are annotated using the EDAM ontology and additional controlled vocabularies, enabling users to search and filter by scientific topics, operations, input/output data types, and data formats. bio.tools supports interactive exploration via rich tool landing pages and provides programmatic access through a documented API for search, retrieval, and registry statistics. The registry has expanded to almost 33,000 annotated tools through the combined contributions of thousands of community members and semi-automated literature mining that keep the registry up to date. Recent improvements to the registry include machine-assisted scoring to prioritise curator review, and consolidation of both its standards stack and software architecture. bio.tools has also become a foundational upstream metadata source that is reused by other services in the ELIXIR Research Software Ecosystem and beyond, to support synchronisation, cross-linking, and additional downstream services. bio.tools is freely available at https://bio.tools.