The World Health Organization on Friday welcomed the announcement that the Indonesian government had agreed to share with the global scientific community the genetic blueprints of the H5N1 avian flu viruses retrieved from human cases in that country.
A WHO official said the Geneva-based organization has instructed the WHO reference laboratories that sequenced the viruses for Indonesia to deposit their blueprints into Genbank, a databank which places no restrictions on who can study the genetic information it contains....
"I’ve learned that scientists across the world have complained that they could not access the data and made statements as if we had hidden it," Indonesian Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said Thursday in a news conference at which she announced the decision to share the sequence data from the human cases. "For the sake of basic human interests, the Indonesian government declares that genomic data on bird flu viruses can be accessed by anyone."
The decision will increase dramatically the amount of sequence data on human H5N1 cases in the public domain. Many of the genetic blueprints of H5N1 cases are held in a password-protected database only available to scientists from the WHO and the laboratories which sequence viruses for it - a situation that has been harshly criticized....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/05/2006 08:06:00 AM.
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.
