Envisioning data sharing for the biocomputing community

Abstract

The scientific community is facing a revolution in several aspects of its modus operandi, ranging from the way science is done—data production, collection, analysis—to the way it is communicated and made available to the public, be that an academic audience or a general one. These changes have been largely determined by two key players: the big data revolution or, less triumphantly, the impressive increase in computational power and data storage capacity; and the accelerating paradigm switch in science publication, with people and policies increasingly pushing towards open access frameworks. All these factors prompt the undertaking of initiatives oriented to maximize the effectiveness of the computational efforts carried out worldwide. Taking the moves from these observations, we here propose a coordinated initiative, focusing on the computational biophysics and biochemistry community but general and flexible in its defining characteristics, which aims at addressing the growing necessity of collecting, rationalizing, sharing and exploiting the data produced in this scientific environment.