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09 November 2010: Mark Harvey's work on bioresources data features in Science

Writing in the 29th October 2010 issue of Science Mark Harvey and co-authors outline howthe development of powerful, high-throughput technologies, together with globalization of scientific research, presents the biomedical research community with unprecedented challenges for the management, archiving, and distribution of data and bioresources. In this context scientific progress depends on efficient and open sharing to generate maximum value.

They suggest that despite this the provision of public funding for these long-term repositories does not fall into the traditional model of science funding and so although funding agencies may exhort their experimental investigators to develop a "dissemination plan" for the data and bioresources they develop, in reality, such requirements are often not fulfilled with few if any consequences.

For Harvey and colleagues this means that funders are often effectively washing their hands of responsibility for future accessibility and reuse of the data and bioresources whose generation they have financed.

In response they argue that a social contract between funding agencies and the scientific community is needed in order to accommodate "bottom-up" integration and "top-down" ring-fenced financing of databases and biorepositories on an international scale.