by the World Health Organization (WHO) to try to slow or contain a pandemic show that to have any hope of success these would require rapid and decisive action within at most a three-week window from the emergence of a pandemic virus. But the handling of the cluster in Indonesia, as described in [a front-page article I’ve published in Nature tonight], is one of delays and confusion....
To understand the genetics, and link this to the epidemiology and pathology of the virus, we need immediate sharing of all virus samples and data. None of this is happening adequately. National governments’ performance is half-hearted, incomplete and far too slow. International organizations are working with their hands tied behind their backs, for bureaucratic and diplomatic reasons. In short, the level of current efforts is not commensurate with the threat we face.”...
So apparently, no one is opposed to depositing the sequences in Genbank immediately, but no one is taking the decision to do so. In the Nature editorial, “Dreams of flu data” [PS: blogged here 3/20/06] we argued: “....When samples are sequenced, the results are usually either restricted by governments or kept private to an old-boy network of researchers linked to the WHO, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the FAO. This is a far cry from the Human Genome Project, in which all the data were placed in the public domain 24 hours after sequencing. Many scientists and organizations are also hoarding sequence data, often for years, so they can be the first to publish in academic journals. With the world facing a possible pandemic, such practices are wholly unacceptable. Nature and its associated journals are not alone in supporting the rapid prior exposure of data when there are acute public-health necessities. Three cheers, then, to Ilaria Capua of the Tri-Veneto Region Experimental Animal Health Care Institute in Italy, who last month threw down the gauntlet to her colleagues by refusing to put her latest data on Nigeria and Italy in these private networks. Instead she uploaded them to GenBank and called on her colleagues worldwide to do likewise. Only in this way can researchers establish and track the global pattern of the evolution of the bird-flu virus.”
Is it perhaps time for the Human Genome Project’s “Bermuda Agreement” on sequence deposition to be applied to all H5N1 sequences?
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
