Notes on the Workshop ‘Solving Bottlenecks in data sharing in the Life sciences’

GEN2PHEN/ Open PHACTS  workshop September 19 and 20, 2011

Aims:

The workshop aimed to explore two directly related topics: data sharing (pushing data outwards from its source to one or other online resources) and data access  (pulling data from one or other online resources for additional use). The goal is to maximally enable and promote 'open' data sharing, i.e., precompetitive, unencumbered, unrestricted, universally equitable dissemination of datasets generated by academia and (to a certain degree) by industry. Therefore, focus was restricted to datasets that are ethico-legally 'safe' to share, or can be made safe to share by some pre-processing, aggregation, anonymisation or via advanced data access methods designed to protect the data. It is accepted that certain other datasets will not be possible to share in any kind of 'open' fashion.