The time for sitting on flu data is over, Nature, June 28, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers). An unsigned editorial. Unfortunately, I don't have access, but here's an excerpt from Declan Butler's blog posting on it:
Indonesia has become the hot spot of avian flu, with the virus spreading quickly in animal populations, and human cases occurring more often there than elsewhere. Yet from 51 reported human cases so far — 39 of them fatal — the genetic sequence of only one flu virus strain has been deposited in GenBank, the publicly accessible database for such information.
Yet scientists outside the WHO networks have no access to these data. The problem last year spurred the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create a consortium to sequence and make public thousands of flu strains from humans and birds. Very quickly, this more open approach led to the useful discovery that viruses swap genes with each other more frequently than had been previously thought.
Some political leaders are drawing the appropriate conclusions. Dennis Kucinich (Democrat, Ohio) and Wayne Gilchrest (Republican, Maryland) are circulating a letter in the House of Representatives that calls on Michael Levitt, the US health secretary, to require H5N1 sequences and other publicly funded research data “to be promptly deposited in a publicly accessible database, such as GenBank”.
Pandemic preparedness planning demands all the scientific resources we can muster. Yet, access to some critical data on avian influenza is being restricted by countries and a few scientists for various reasons including intellectual property rights. As explained in the attached letter to Secretary Leavitt [Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services or HHS], there are already models of public databases that provide protection for such concerns. Please join me in asking Secretary Leavitt to advocate that data from HHS funded research on avian influenza, and in particular, genetic sequences, be promptly placed in a publicly accessible database....
[The belief that prestigious journals will not publish articles whose underlying data are already public is] ill-researched;...[anyone who read] the Dreams of Flu Data editorial [Nature, March 16, 2006]...could rest assured that: “Nature and its associated journals are not alone in supporting the rapid prior exposure of data when there are acute public-health necessities.”...
With respect to animal sequences, the Paris-based World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) this month conceded to pressure and said that they would work with the NIH to sequence H5N1 samples from birds and deposit them in GenBank.
The World Health Organization (WHO), and its member states, are likewise acutely aware that the political pressure is now on for immediate access to human sequence and clinical data on H5N1 cases. There are legitimate issues to be worked out, such as ensuring that the researchers who do the sequencing, and the countries from which the samples are derived, get credit. But these are soluble, through various permutations, for example, of the Creative Commons licences, and other legal safeguards, that allow immediate sharing, while protecting the interests of the producer of the data. But the WHO knows very well that that the diplomatic imperatives that maintained the pre-SARs lack of transparency are no longer an option, and I think we will see leadership from it in the near future, perhaps before the end of summer.
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.
