Data sharing: Make outbreak research open access : Nature News & Comment

"Last April, five months into the largest Ebola outbreak in history, an international group of researchers sequenced three viral genomes, sampled from patients in Guinea1. The data were made public that same month. Two months later, our group at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sequenced 99 more Ebola genomes, from patients at the Kenema Government Hospital in Sierra Leone.  We immediately uploaded the data to the public database GenBank (see go.nature.com/aotpbk). Our priority was to help curb the outbreak. Colleagues who had worked with us for a decade were at the front lines and in immediate danger; some later died. We were amazed by the surge of collaboration that followed. Numerous experts from diverse disciplines, including drug and vaccine developers, contacted us. We also formed unexpected alliances — for instance, with a leading evolutionary virologist, who helped us to investigate when the strain of virus causing the current outbreak arose.  The genomic data confirmed that the virus had spread from Guinea to Sierra Leone, and indicated that the outbreak was being sustained by human-to-human transmission, not contact with bats or some other carrier. They also suggested new probable routes of infection and, importantly, revealed where and how fast mutations were occurring2. This information is crucial to designing effective diagnostics, vaccines and antibody-based therapies. What followed was three months of stasis, during which no new virus sequence information was made public (see 'Gaps in the data'). Some genomes are known to have been generated during this time from patients treated in the United States3. The number is likely to have been much larger: thousands of samples were transferred to researchers' freezers across the world. In an increasingly connected world, rapid sequencing, combined with new ways to collect clinical and epidemiological data, could transform our response to outbreaks. But the power of these potentially massive data sets to combat epidemics will be realized only if the data are shared as widely and as quickly as possible. Currently, no good guidelines exist to ensure that this happens ..."