Scientists recognize that free access to data is synergistic for fostering major advances. Concerns about standards of sharing are particularly acute with respect to large-scale DNA sequence and microarray data. Although some types of data have shallow histories or unclear protocols for how one would share them, DNA sequences have been deposited to the joint databases of GenBank, EMBL, and the DNA Databank of Japan for over a decade, and many journals have policies requiring such submission before a paper can be accepted. For simplicity, we refer to these databases jointly as “GenBank.”...
We know from personal experience that authors of published papers reporting DNA sequences sometimes intentionally fail to deposit their sequences to GenBank and refuse to release them upon request. Is this a rare exception, or do many papers make it past coauthors, associate editors, editors, reviewers, and journal staff without providing the purportedly required data accession numbers?
We examined the frequency with which published studies failed to submit their DNA sequences to GenBank....No journal [we surgeyed] had complete compliance with its requirement for all DNA sequences to have been submitted to GenBank. Between 3% and 20% of papers in these journals did not include GenBank accession numbers, and between 3% and 15% of studies never submitted their DNA sequences at all....
Although the failure to submit DNA sequences to GenBank appears rare...[w]e suggest [a remedy]. In the 21st century, many writers access publications online. We propose that, in cases where an author has not released DNA sequences, the author be given one month notice, at which point, if accession numbers are not provided, the publication is removed from the journal Web site until compliance is reached....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/11/2006 11:41:00 AM.
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.
