%0 Journal Article
%T Data reporting standards: making the things we use better
%A John Quackenbush
%J Genome Medicine
%D 2009
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/gm111
%X There was a time when making one's data publicly available meant publishing the image of a gel as part of a manuscript. After all, anyone else could look at the evidence in the picture, judge the quality of the data, and draw a conclusion about whether the data supported the conclusions presented in the manuscript. As DNA sequence data began to become more common in published research articles, authors regularly included figures or tables that presented the base sequence they had determined, and other scientists could use those data by manually transcribing the sequence and performing their own analysis. But as the complexity of sequence data grew and the scale of sequencing expanded with improvements in technology, it quickly became obvious that other, more systematic solutions were necessary.And hence was born GenBank and the other international sequence repositories. GenBank started at Los Alamos National Laboratory as little more than a research project on how to index and archive DNA sequence, and quickly became an international resource and one of the major products of the National Library of Medicine and its National Center for Biotechnology Information (which was largely created to deal with just this type of data). In time, authors were no longer required to 'publish' their sequence data in research articles, but instead simply had to provide an 'accession number' that essentially guaranteed that other scientists could download the data and re-analyze them to verify the published results. As sequencing technologies evolved, the genome sequence databases adapted to provide sequence-quality data and other information that was essential to understand and interpret the data.And in most instances, all one needed to analyze the data was a minimal amount of information about the source. Even submitting data to these public repositories was relatively easy - the instruments that generated the data generally reported them in a standard format that could easily be up
%U http://genomemedicine.com/content/1/11/111