Sustaining the Data and Bioresource Commons

Globalization of biomedical research requires sustained investment for databases and biorepositories. Development of powerful, high-throughput technologies, together with globalization of scientific research, presents the biomedical research community with unprecedented challenges for the management, archiving, and distribution of data and bioresources (1). We need a social contract between funding agencies and the scientific community to accommodate “bottom-up” integration and “top-down” financing of databases and biorepositories on an international scale.