Unpublished genomic data–how to share?

Shreeya Nanda^* and Maria K Kowalczuk

* Corresponding author: Shreeya NandaShreeya.Nanda@biomedcentral.com

BioMed Central, 236 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8HB, UK

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BMC Genomics 2014, 15:5 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-15-5

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/15/5

Received:	19 December 2013
Accepted:	19 December 2013
Published:	14 January 2014

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Abstract

The field of genomics is often cited as the branch of biology that has led the way in data sharing. In most cases, sequencing data are made publicly available immediately after generation and often before the data generators have completed their analyses. Although the pros of such openness cannot be denied, problems can arise when unpublished genomic data are shared. In this editorial we touch on these issues and discuss the roles and responsibilities of the data generators, data users and journal editors.