An International Effort to Develop a Policy for ‘Omics Data Sharing

Summary

An international effort is underway to develop a framework to enable the sharing of biological data generated from a wide variety of experiments. This week in the journal Science key stakeholders and members of international funding agencies, including Dr. Susan Gregurick from the Department of Energy, have published a template for policies related to the sharing of ‘Omics data and information. At the heart of this template is the notion that all data and information relevant to published results should be made available to the scientific community in a timely fashion, according to international data standards and in the appropriate scientific databases. This policy follows directly from and is in line with the DOE’s Genomic Science data and information sharing policy of October 1, 2008 policy statement In order to facilitate continued development of data sharing policies, a website has been set up to encourage the exchange of ideas and policy comments among funders and researcher Biosharing website. Details of this article can be found in Science 9 October 2009: 234-236.