Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

Despite some notable progress in
data sharing policies and practices,
restrictions are still often placed
on the open and unconditional use
of various genomic data after they
have received official approval for
release to the public domain or to public
databases. These restrictions, which often
conflict with the terms and conditions of
the funding bodies who supported the re-
lease of those data for the benefit of the
scientific community and society, are per-
petuated by the lack of clear guiding rules
for data usage. Existing guidelines for data
released to the public domain recognize
but fail to resolve tensions between the im-
portance of free and unconditional use of
these data and the “right” of the data pro-
ducers to the first publication. This self-
contradiction has resulted in a loophole
that allows different interpretations and a
continuous debate between data producers
and data users on the use of public data.
We argue that the publicly available data
should be treated as open data, a shared
resource with unrestricted use for analysis,
interpretation, and publication.