Data Availability and Access

The Generation Challenge Programme produces public goods: in principle all outputs of GCP project belong in the public domain. Data do not form an exception. However, this does not answer the question what data should be considered output. Are the gel-scans or the raw data files produced by a sequencer outputs, or do we only condider the processed and validated datasets to be the outputs. Another relevant issue is the required confidentiallity while the data are analysed and the results are published.

Currently the GCP requires that all project proposals include a description of the data that will be produced and made public, and the way they will be made public. Currently there are three ways of making data produced in GCP projects public and accessible.

• First of all there is the 'conventional way' of uploading the data to public databases such as GenBank or UniProt, or to institutional databases such as IRIS, or any other relatively stable and publicly accessible database.



• Secondly data can be uploaded to the GCP Central Registry. This Central Registry aims at providing access to a variety of data sets produced in the GCP, that have been uploaded by the scientists.



• The third and final way of making the data accessible is by offering them as a webservice, so that they can be used as a resources by any website or analytic programme on the web.

back
back to the GCP bioinformatics portal page