nature genetics | volume 43 | number 6 | june 2011 503 correspondence many different aspects of bioresource utili- zation, including economic implications, it was decided to concentrate first on use and impact in research settings. Access and sharing policies have been developed over the years6. However, the incentivization of bioresources to promote access needs to be balanced with appropriate provisions compatible with all stakeholder interests, that is, proper recognition of sci- entific contribution and sustainability sup- ported by the capacity for measuring their own resource use and impact. There are no mechanisms in place to measure this impact. Empowering bioresources with tools such as BRIF is therefore urgent. The full impact of bioresources is wider than BRIF, but unique bioresource identi- fiers and metrics must be established as the first operational step. The present prolifera- tion of ideas, statements and proposals around data sharing from different perspectives and stakeholders1���3,7 favors the implementation of tools such as BRIF in order to make data sharing principles operational. Workshop par- ticipants and members of the working group urge concerned stakeholders to join our efforts in developing such an instrument. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The BRIF workshop was funded by the European Community���s Seventh Framework project ���Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure��� (BBMRI), grant agreement 212111. The BRIF research also received funds from FP7 collaborative projects GEN2PHEN (Genotype-to-Phenotype Databases: A Holistic Solution), grant agreement 200754 and BioSHaRE-EU (Biobank Standardisation and Harmonisation for Research Excellence in the European Union) and grant agreement 261433. In addition to thanking all the BRIF workshop participants for their active contribution, we wish to thank E. Bravo, A. Garcia-Montero, M. Morente, C. Neylon, C. Schr��der, V. Tate, S. Wallace and M. Yuille for having provided input in the global debate through the BRIF online forum and for discussion. AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS A.C.-T. has been directing the BRIF initiative from the birth of concept. L.M. has been involved in organizing the working group and the workshop of bioresources was recognized by all we focused on shared aims but underlined that each community had specific aspects to con- sider and resolve. Bioresources need to be identified by a unique digital identifier (ID), ideally through existing mechanisms4. Digital object identi- fiers (DOIs) may be interesting (http://www. doi.org/). Several issues must be considered, including what to identify (biobank, collec- tion, database, dataset, subset and version), identifier requirements (persistent over time, globally unique, citable) and which inter- national and independent body should be responsible for assigning bioresource IDs. Working subgroups were created to address those questions. Attribution of credit to sci- entists for different kinds of work (in addi- tion to publications) using researcher IDs was also discussed. The ORCID initiative (http://www.orcid.org/) is building a new contributor ID framework which should, in principle, enable credit to be given to both bioresources and individuals involved in their creation and maintenance. Standardization of citation is necessary but could be combined with existing referencing standards and conventions5, such as citing marker papers, standardized sentences in the materials and methods or acknowledg- ments sections of papers, co-authorship when justified and including the resource name in the paper title. Specific requirements for cit- ing bioresources are lacking in the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (http://www.icmje.org/ urm_main.html, version April 2010) and should be added. In order to enable auto- mated tracking of bioresource use, the biore- source ID should ideally appear in or under the abstract section in order to be visible even without access to the full text of articles. BRIF should not be a citation index only. Factors such as time and domain of biore- sources need to be considered in the calcula- tion process and its weighting. Although the BRIF scope could be extended to measure To the Editor: Numerous health research funding institu- tions have recently expressed their strong will to promote data sharing1 (http://www. wellcome.ac.uk/publichealthdata). As under- lined in a recent editorial in Nature Medicine, an operational approach is needed to achieve this goal2. Bioresources such as biobanks, databases and bioinformatics tools are important elements in this land- scape. Bioresources need to be easily acces- sible to facilitate advancement of research. Besides technical and ethical aspects, a major obstacle for sharing them is the absence of recognition of the effort behind establish- ing and maintaining such resources. The main objective of proposing a Bioresource Research Impact Factor (BRIF) is to promote the sharing of bioresources by creating a link between their initiators or implementers and the impact of the scientific research using them3. A BRIF would make it possible to trace the quantitative use of a bioresource, the kind of research using it and the efforts of the people and institutions that construct it and make it available. In the context of EU projects, a BRIF work- ing group has been set up, including 101 par- ticipants so far (http://www.gen2phen.org/ groups/brif-bio-resource-impact-factor). The work involves several steps: creating a unique identifier, standardizing bioresource acknowledgment in papers, cataloging biore- source data access and sharing policies, iden- tifying other parameters to take into account, and prototype testing with the help of volun- teer bioresources and journal editors. The first BRIF workshop was held in Toulouse, France (January 17���18, 2011), gathering 34 people from ten countries and representing various domains: biobanks, genome databases, epidemiological longi- tudinal cohorts, bioinformatics, scientific publishing, bibliometry, health law and bioethics (http://precedings.nature.com/ collections/brif-workshop-january-2011). The lack of objective measures for the use The role of a bioresource research impact factor as an incentive to share human bioresources �� 20 1 1 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.

504 volume 43 | number 6 | june 2011 | nature genetics correspondence 1018, Villejuif, France. 20Estonian Genome Center, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia. 21Laboratorio ImmunoBiolog��a Molecular, Spanish HIV HGM BioBank, Madrid, Spain. 22Department of Medical Genetics, University of P��cs, P��cs, Hungary. 23Estonian Genome Center, Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia. 24Estonian Biocentre, Tartu, Estonia. 25Biobusiness Consulting, Inc., Lowell, Massachusetts, USA. 26Istituto Superiore di Sanita, Rome, Italy. 27World Health Organization, Department of Health Statistics & Informatics, Geneva, Switzerland. 28National Institute for Cancer Research, Genoa, Italy. 29International Prevention Research Institute, Lyon, France. 30Fundaci�� IMIM, Barcelona, Spain. 31Thomson Reuters, Toulouse, France. 32Claudius Regaud Institute, Toulouse, France. 33Biomed Central, London, UK. 34Latvian Biomedical Research and Study Center, Genome Database of Latvian Population [LGDB], Riga, Latvia. 35McGill University, Centre of Genomics and Policy, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 1. Walport, M. & Brest, P. Lancet 377, 2011���2018 (2011). 2. Anonymous. Nat. Med. 17, 137 (2011). 3. Cambon-Thomsen, A. Nat. Genet. 34, 25���26 (2003). 4. Kauffmann, F. & Cambon-Thomsen, A. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 299, 2316���2318 (2008). 5. Peterson, J. & Campbell, J. Nat. Genet. 42, 919 (2010). 6. Kaye, J., Heeney, C., Hawkins, N., de Vries, J. & Boddington, P. Nat. Rev. Genet. 10, 331���335 (2009). 7. Toronto International Data Release Workshop Authors et al. Nature 461, 168���170 (2009). Federica Napolitani26, Mikkel Z Oestergaard27, Barbara Parodi28, Markus Pasterk29, Acacia Reiche30, Emmanuelle Rial-Sebbag5,6, Guillaume Rivalle31, Philippe Rochaix32, Guillaume Susbielle33, Linda Tarasova34, Mogens Thomsen5,6, Gudmundur A Thorisson11, Ma���n H Zawati35 & Marie Zins15,16 5Inserm, UMR1027, Epidemiology and Analyses in Public Health, Toulouse, France. 6Universit�� de Toulouse, Universit�� Paul Sabatier, Toulouse III, UMR 1027, Toulouse, France. 7Center for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona, Spain. 8University of Amsterdam, Department of Philosophy, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 9Australian Breast Cancer Tissue Bank, University of Sydney, New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. 10Inserm, Public Health Institute, Paris, France. 11Department of Genetics, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK. 12P3G, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 133C-R, Toulouse, France. 14Laboratorio Diagnosi Pre-Postnatale Malattie Metaboliche, Istituto G. Gaslini, G. Gaslini Institute, Genova, Italy. 15Inserm U1018, Centre for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health, Villejuif, France. 16Versailles-Saint Quentin University, UMRS 1018, Versailles, France. 17European, Middle Eastern and African Society for Biopreservation and Biobanking (ESBB), Aix en Provence, France. 18Laboratory of Clinical and Experimental Pathology & Human Biobank, Pasteur Hospital, University of Nice Sophia, Nice, France. 19Paris Sud University, UMRS and has participated in the writing of this correspondence. G.A.T. has been very active in commenting and amending this correspondence and proposing references and relevant URLs. The workshop group participants have actively fueled the whole debate, part of which is reported in the present correspondence. COMPETING FINANCIAL INTERESTS The authors declare no competing financial interests. Anne Cambon-Thomsen1,2, Gudmundur A Thorisson3 & Laurence Mabile1,2 for the BRIF workshop group4 1Inserm, UMR1027, Epidemiology and Analyses in Public Health, Toulouse, France. 2Universit�� de Toulouse, Universit�� Paul Sabatier, Toulouse III, UMR 1027, Toulouse, France. 3Department of Genetics, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK. 4A full list of members appears at the end of the paper. Correspondence should be addressed to A.C.-T. (cambon@cict.fr). NAMED COLLABORATORS Sandrine Andrieu5,6, Gabrielle Bertier7, Martin Boeckhout8, Anne Cambon-Thomsen5,6, Jane Carpenter9, Georges Dagher10, Raymond Dalgleish11, Myl��ne Desch��nes12, Jeanne H��l��ne di Donato13, Mirella Filocamo14, Marcel Goldberg15,16, Robert Hewitt17, Paul Hofman18, Francine Kauffmann15,19, Liis Leitsalu20, Irene Lomba21, Laurence Mabile5,6, Bela Melegh22, Andres Metspalu20,23,24, Lisa Miranda25, �� 20 1 1 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.