UPSIDE: Uniform principle for sharing integral data and materials expeditiously.

I n October 2001, a National Academies committee was convened to examine the responsibilities of authorship in the biological sciences. This blue ribbon group was drawn broadly from academia, the commercial sector, and scientific publishing and was chaired by Tom Cech, president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The committee evaluated the responsibilities of authors to share data and materials referenced in their publications, the role of journals to impose requirements for data and material sharing, and whether a common set of requirements for sharing does or should exist. For example, many felt that it was inappropriate and a bad precedent to report portions of the sequence of the human genome without full disclosure (1), and the committee considered these issues broadly. In 2003 the Cech committee published the results of the study (2). The report puts forth recommendations for effective common practices and provides specific real-life scenarios to test how these practices could be applied. The committee concludes that core scientific standards accepted by the great majority of the community do exist and should be more widely adopted. PNAS polices have long followed the core values stated in the Cech report, and we are vocal proponents of broad and transparent data sharing. We think the report should be required reading for all life scientists and journal editors. There are a few areas where we have not explicitly spelled out, as the report recommends, our policy and procedures on ensuring proper data sharing. Accordingly, we have now made these explicit in our Information for Authors, published in this issue and posted on the PNAS web site (www.pnas.org misc iforc.shtml). The heart of the Cech committee report is what they termed ‘‘UPSIDE,’’ or the ‘‘uniform principle for sharing integral data and materials expeditiously.’’ An abbreviated form of the five core principles that make up UPSIDE are shown in Table 1. The central tenet of UPSIDE was well stated: