Bermuda's Legacy: Policy, Timing and the Genome Commons

From the abstract: Although the open availability of scientific data is fundamental to the modern scientific enterprise, the sharing of data has not always been accomplished with the speed or regularity that traditional norms of scientific conduct would dictate. A group of scientists and policy-makers met in 1996 to develop principles for rapid pre-publication release of genomic data to enable better coordination of the massive human genome project and to accelerate the progress of science in general. The resulting Bermuda Principles, requiring the release of all genomic sequence data to public databases within twenty-four hours after generation, were revolutionary in their scope and lasting in their effect. Remarkably, the practice of rapid data sharing embodied in the Bermuda Principles has survived the completion of the human genome project and continues to be reaffirmed today, but not without qualifications. Among these have been the necessary evolution of genomic data release policies to account for the expanded use of personally-identifiable data, the desire for data generators to retain priority over publications based on their data, and the looming specter of intellectual property encumbrances on publicly-available data. In each of these cases policy-makers have utilized increasingly sophisticated timing mechanisms to dictate how and when data should be released and used. By regulating the speed at which data must be released to the public and limited-duration restrictions on the use of that data following its release, policy-makers helped to enable the creation of a vast body of publicly-available genomic knowledge....