PNNL

Abstract

All public funding agencies and foundations that support the generation of new data have a data release policy. Some policies require the immediate public release of the produced data, so that everyone will benefit equally from their availability, while other agencies have policies that allow data to be kept private until their initial publication so that the investigator(s) collecting the data have precedence. To address the issues of sharing genomic data, particularly the sharing of pre-publication data, biomedical scientists agreed upon and created a public declaration in 2003, which came to be known as the Fort Lauderdale Agreement (1). This declaration supports the free and unrestricted use of genome sequencing data by the scientific community before those data are used for publication. It proposed that the scientist leading the generation of new data should “make the data generated by the resource immediately and freely available without restriction”. The agreement encouraged users of publicly released data to “appropriately cite the source of the data analysed and acknowledge the resource producers”. Moreover, it recommended that the users of the data should “recognize that the resource producers have a legitimate interest in publishing prominent peer-reviewed reports describing and analyzing the resource that they have produced”. The above recommendations led to the wide adoption of general standards, whereby the scientists that lead the generation of new data retain the “rights” to first publication even after the data become publicly available.