Top genome scientists are emphatically reaffirming the requirement that large-scale DNA sequence producers release their data to all other researchers immediately after they generate it, and urging vast expansion of this obligatory pre-publication data-sharing.
The principle, they say, should include all sequence data and should be extended to other international collaborative projects such as the Mammalian Gene Collection, the SNP Consortium, the International HapMap Project — and perhaps eventually to other "community resource projects," such as large-scale protein structure determination or gene expression analysis. The policy might also apply to microbial sequencing, even when a sequence is generated in a single small lab.
At present, the US National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and other genome funders call upon the large-scale sequencers they support to release sequence assemblies larger than 2 kb into the public databases within 24 hours; raw shotgun sequences must be released within a week. Other researchers ...
