My data, your data

Edinburgh hosted the Data Intensive Research workshop last week, along with the XLDB Europe. Genially chaired by the formidable Malcolm Atkinson, it was an excellent opportunity to hobnob with other data management folk. While most were database people, many were plain ol' data managers, or people who have data and nowhere to put it.

One of the recurring themes was that there should be more recognition for the work supporting science: if you have a dataset and you spend time preparing, validating, and annotating it, and someone else publishes a result derived from this data, they get the credit for the discovery - naturally - but the work to prepare the data should also be recognised (e.g. in RAEs, maybe as something equivalent to a publication.) Also if it doesn't lead directly to a new discovery. People who share data contribute to science. Moreover, these days, sharing data is often necessary for public funding.

The NGS has a few datasets in bioinformatics already. Having it available already is highly advantageous because you don't have to transfer and update it yourself, and it doesn't take up any space in your storage quota. If there are other datasets you think the NGS could usefully provide, let us know?

Speaking of research support, if you use the NGS you should of course cite NGS in your publications. But maybe you'll also want to buy your friendly local NGS admins a beer or something?