Closure of the NCBI SRA and implications for the long-term future of genomics data storage

摘要

The National Center for Biotechnology Information(NCBI) in the US recently announced that, as a result ofbudgetary constraints, it would no longer be acceptingsubmissions to its Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and thatover the course of the next year or so it would slowlyphase out support for this database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra). There seems to be a certain amount ofconfusion in the community about what effect thisdecision will have. At Genome Biology we feel that thefree availability of data is an important concept for science,so we asked the views of various interested people on whatthe short-term implications of this announcement willbe, and also how they envisaged the future of data storagein the long term. These people include those involved inthe running of the databases (David Lipman (DL) fromthe NCBI and Paul Flicek (PF) from the European Bio-informatics Institute (EBI)) and users of the data storedin the database as well as data producers (Steven Salzberg(SS) from the University of Maryland, Mark Gerstein(MG) from Yale University and Rob Knight (RK) from theUniversity of Colorado).