Resources, repositories and rewards.

Vivian Siegel is at the Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee, USA (e-mail: [email protected]) By establishing the Resource Article section and stronger policies for materialssharing and citation, we hope to encourage and properly reward the development and sharing of resources, thereby accelerating research using model organisms to advance human health Scientific communities prosper on shared information and material, which allow for both confirmation and advancement of research. Journals, as a nexus of communication and as enablers of scientific work, generally, and rightfully, insist that the information obtained and the materials created in the course of doing published work be made available for future research use – the publishing quid pro quo. Yet, while researchers thrive on the acclaim afforded by publishing, many resist sharing their results and reagents – this is perhaps to their advantage in the short term, but to the detriment of expedient scientific progress in the long term. After several frustrated attempts to obtain a published reagent, scientists often end up either making the reagent themselves or changing projects; each year, one in nine scientists abandons a project because of a denied request for ‘research input’ (material or data) (Walsh et al., 2005; www.casimir.org.uk/storyfiles/66.0.09_00_Walsh.pdf). For reagents that are simple and cheap to recreate (such as DNA clones), it is often faster to make the reagent than to ask for it. But for those materials that are expensive and time consuming to create, such as the model organisms that are central to the interests of this journal, we need more insistent policies, supportive infrastructures and rewards to ensure the timely sharing of research materials. Although journals have had materials-sharing policies in place for some time, these policies have largely failed. In 2001, the National Academy of Sciences convened a committee to propose an explicit solution to the problem (www.nap.edu/ catalog.php?record_id=10613). From this came UPSIDE: ‘Uniform Principle for Sharing Integral Data and Materials Expeditiously’. UPSIDE recommends that authors of publications anticipate which materials are likely to be requested and state within the paper how to obtain them, including the provision of a license to use patented material for research use. Many funding bodies followed these recommendations. For example, the NIH policy on ‘sharing model organisms for biomedical research’ states: ‘By sharing of research resources and, thus, avoiding the duplication of very expensive efforts to generate model organism models, the NIH is able to support more investigators than if these useful models had to be generated in duplicate by more than one NIH-funded investigator. ...all investigators submitting an NIH application or contract proposal...are expected to include in the application/proposal a description of a specific plan for sharing and distributing unique model organism research resources generated using NIH funding so that other researchers can benefit from these resources... Applicants/Offerors are also expected to address as part of the sharing plan if, or how, they will exercise their intellectual property rights while making model organisms and research resources available to the broader scientific community’ (NOT-OD-04-042; http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/noticefiles/NOT-OD-04-042.html). Such ‘sharing plans’ are now included in most grant applications. Why then, is it still so difficult to acquire published model organisms? And how can journals such as DMM facilitate sharing in new ways? At the core of this issue is the infrastructure required to support sharing. I recently attended a meeting in Rome that focused on these issues, especially as they pertain to the community of scientists who use mouse models. Organized by CASIMIR