Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, has announced that it is conducting two experiments to help improve best practices for pre-publication data sharing and drafting of community standards in the genomics research community. NPG journals Nature Genetics and Nature Precedings are carrying out the two experiments.
In 2009, Nature published an article arising from a data release workshop with recommendations for prepublication data sharing. This first experiment is attempting to directly address the issues that arose, for example ensuring that data is available to the community before publication and giving researchers credit for the rapid release of data generated in large-scale reference projects prior to publication.
Pre-publication data sharing is the practice of making data publicly available for use by other scientists before the data-producing scientists have had a chance to publish on the data themselves. The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) funded Human Microbiome Project, Nature Precedings and Nature Genetics are collaborating to pilot a community experiment to encourage pre-publication data sharing on Nature Precedings.
By posting data management and release plans - often called marker papers - in Nature Precedings, data-producing scientists can describe the data available as well as the timescale for release, quality control, ethical and legal considerations, as well as any funder-mandated restrictions on competing publication. The documents are permanently archived in a stable and citable format for reference by other scientists who wish to perform their own analyses on the data in accordance with any restrictions. The documents can also be used to assess the impact of released data sets.
A collection of marker papers and data plans from the Human Microbiome Project forms the pilot for this community experiment.
Additionally, Nature Genetics has commissioned a perspective on standards of functional analysis that build upon genome-wide association studies of cancer. The draft is authored by grantees of the National Institutes of Health Post-Genome Wide Association Study Initiative and is currently open for community review as a preprint on Nature Precedings. Substantial contributions will earn co-authorship credit. It is expected that this process will lead to a more robust set of criteria with broader consensus in the community and widespread adoption.
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