Syngenta declined to deposit its data in GenBank, the open public storehouse of genetic material. A Chinese-led team of academics published a blueprint of the indica strain of rice in the same issue, and that map will be available on Genbank.2 "It's a fundamental principle of scientific publication that you provide the data and that science can build on it," says Robert H. Waterston of the Washington University, one of 19 leading scientists who signed a letter protesting Science's special arrangement with Syngenta. "This has been a procedure that has worked very well over several hundred years."
The journal's editor-in-chief Donald A. Kennedy says Syngenta had set up a system of data access that met Science's standards, including what seemed to be open release to academic researchers. The compromise, he says, was necessary to give academic researchers as much access as possible to the genetic data for the most important ...
