Zika-microcephaly paper sparks data-sharing confusion : Nature News & Comment

"When researchers in Brazil posted four Zika virus genome sequences in the online repository GenBank on 26 January, they were complying with a call for scientists to openly release their data during public-health emergencies. By 10 February, the information had been used by Slovenian researchers for their own Zika paper in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)1 — apparently, a textbook example of the power of rapid, open data-sharing. But the process didn’t go entirely smoothly. Oliver Pybus, an evolutionary and infectious-disease biologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who works with the Brazilian group, has complained that the NEJM paper did not adequately credit the original data-providers when it only included the GenBank accession number for the data. And Pybus says that he is concerned that this lack of formal recognition could dissuade others from rapidly sharing data during an outbreak ..."