The NCI's Office of Cancer Clinical Proteomics Research (OCCPR) is leading international efforts to address a considerable obstacle to the field: the lack of widely followed policies governing the rapid release of large-scale proteomic data into the public domain. By emulating the power of the Human Genome Project (HGP) of having community resources of high-quality data, the office has been pushing efforts to accelerate similar efforts in proteomics. As a result, on August 14, 2008, the NCI sponsored an international summit in The Netherlands that included members from the research community, funding agencies (e.g. NIH), policy makers, and industry to define what it will take to have proteomics data released into the public domain as soon as they are produced.
The outcome of this summit, the Amsterdam Principles, provides recommendations for rapid proteomics data release and sharing policies that are similar to the Bermuda Principles, a series of standardized data sharing policies that served as a catalyst in the world of genomics. It was agreed that, at a minimum, what the community both wants and needs is high quality, well-annotated raw data. Access to these data will require the proper infrastructure: community-supported standardized formats, controlled vocabularies and ontologies, minimal reporting requirements, and publicly available online repositories. The release of such data would put the pace of proteomic research on a trajectory similar to that seen in genomics research.
The Amsterdam Principles include guidelines for the following:
The Amsterdam Principles White Paper: Recommendations from the 2008 International Summit on Proteomics Data Release and Sharing Policy: The Amsterdam Principles. Journal of Proteome Research 2009; 8: 3689-3692.
Additional Data Sharing Publications
Share the Data: Making Large-Scale Proteomics Data Widely Available. Bio-IT World. Published online Aug 25, 2010.
Prepublication data sharing. Nature. 2009 Sep 10;461(7261):168-70.
Sharing The Wealth Of Data. Scientific American worldVIEW. 2008 May.
Opening up Rosetta. SciBX; 2(14); doi:10.1038/scibx.2009.561. Published online April 9 2009.
International Summit on Proteomics Data Release and Sharing Policy. J. Proteome Res.; 2008 Nov; 7(11) pp 4609 - 4609; (Editorial) [Epub 2008 Oct 7]