Science benefits from rapid, open data sharing. Considering costs for fieldwork and sampling, permitting and ethics approvals, as well as processing, sequencing, and personnel for data analysis, nucleic acid sequencing data are expensive for data creators to acquire and process.

While we have achieved a good standard of data sharing in the genomic sciences overall, there is opportunity for further improvement. Some of the rules governing how we share data stem from a different era, we propose to augment the community-wide data sharing standards to enable even wider and earlier sharing of data. In light of the lessons learned in the pandemic and the fact that databases are now several millions times larger than when the current rule-set was devised, it seems it is a good time to update our approach. 

For this purpose we suggest a roadmap to establish updated practices, introducing a Data Reuse Information tag (DRI) for public sequencing data, which will be associated with at least one Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) account.

            We are requesting all researchers working with sequencing data fill out the following poll to provide background information for developing a new community standard: https://forms.gle/Q3eq7CP3F935qhfg7. The poll will close January 31st 2024.

Thanks from the DRI team: Laura Hug, Alexander Probst, Folker Meyer, Roland Hatzenpichler, Cristina Moraru, and André Soares