Usage Patterns of Open Genomic Data

Jingfeng Xia is Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University; e-mail: [email protected]. Ying Liu is a Doctoral Student in the School of Economics and Management at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications; e-mail: [email protected]. © 2013 Jingfeng Xia and Ying Liu, Attribution-NonCommercial (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) CC BY-NC This paper uses Genome Expression Omnibus (GEO), a data repository in biomedical sciences, to examine the usage patterns of open data repositories. It attempts to identify the degree of recognition of data reuse value and understand how e-science has impacted a large-scale scholarship. By analyzing a list of 1,211 publications that cite GEO data to support their independent studies, it discovers that free data can support a wealth of high-quality investigations, that the rate of open data use keeps growing over the years, and that scholars in different countries show different rates of complying with data-sharing policies.