"Yes, I think it's an aberration," Science editor in chief Don Kennedy told The Scientist. "But that doesn't mean I'm prepared to say never." Kennedy won't rule out future exceptions to conventional publishing practices. He says that Science's criterion remains the same: "If the public benefits from publishing a paper and getting a sequence out and publicly accessible, if those benefits exceed the cost of the precedent, we should do it."
Regardless of whether the Celera genome paper proves to be an aberration, the paper, and Science's stance, have certainly contributed to ongoing concerns regarding issues of data and materials sharing. These issues—access to published data, material transfer regulations, data exchange between scientists in academia and industry—are not new. But they've gained a renewed prominence in light of increasingly large databases and increasingly intertwined academia-industry collaborations.
Participants were asked to split into working groups to address to several hypothetical scenarios. ...
