Friday, April 15, 2011

commons platform

Setting up a computational platform for commons activities

Being discussed today.


Part 2 is an open discussion forum for participants to help guide the development of the Sage platform. Based on the knowledge the attendees gain of the work at Sage and their previous experience, how should the platform vision be refined? What are the most critical priorities for development? What opportunities for collaboration exist? What are the things to watch out for. Discussions will be focus on these topics:
  • Datasets: How can Sage-hosted data best be made available to other groups for reuse?
  • Tools and Networks: How can existing analysis tools be brought into the platform vision for a shared, hosted computational space?
  • People and Projects: How can the platform facilitate sharing resources across distributed research teams?

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Data Sharing policies for stem cell researchers

Also see Stem Cell Bioinformatics
Needs
A Data Sharing policy for stem cell researchers at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute is required
In the longer term, we seek to establish a Stem Cell Commons that is accesisble and represents an environment for the broader Stem Cell Community.


Our community within the Institute of over 70 laboratories seeks to share its data in a uniform manner. However each group has researchers who value privileged pre-publication access. Postdoctoral students wish to study their data, but aspects of their data may not be explored by them. This same data can be integrated in the context of other datasets from other researchers.

Options
Available policies
BMC publications
12 Steps to creating a Data Sharing Policy (biosharing.org)
SAGE commons Goals and Principles of human data sharing
Current SAGE commons data sharing policy
NIH Genomics data sharing policy devleopment
Wellcome Trust policy
Prepublication data sharing (Nature)
Interview With Susanna-Assunta Sansone (Susanna drives standards development in the community)
Access to Stem Cells and Data: Persons, Property Rights, and Scientific Progress (Science)

Concept
What are the rules under which data can be contributed?
- shared ?
What are the rules under which those who access Stem Cell Commons data?
What Principles to govern the commons sharing, and the visitors and contributors to the commons?
What plan to communicate and engage the wider community in the Commons?

Organisation
Probably, we wil establish a data sharing working group that will clarify the mandate, and review available policies. Subsequently it will establish a straw dog policy for discussion and executive review.
Importantly, it is yet to be established to whom, and under what constraints the data policy will be applied.

Application
Initially, the policy may be applied to researchers contributing data to the HSCI internal commons. As this policy has the bugs worked out, we will seek to expand the policy to the Stem Cell Commons, which itself will be provided once we have completed development of the Commons Principles.