Be openly accessible or be obscure

Open access genomes! (but how is OA protected?), Dave Love, dave love’s blog, October 21, 2008. Excerpt:

We have come a long way in the last 15 years since Craig Venter and his company, Celera, refused to deposit their human genomic sequence in NCBI/GenBank and others who practice gene patenting deflated our collective tyres. I think that PGP understands the benefits of being OA, but I didn’t see anything on their website about a legal backbone to protect that access, such as a Creative Commons copyrights. I hope they will get some advice on this from librarians, lawyers, publishers, and others in the OA community!

For more about the PGP, see: More on the Personal Genome Project, Gavin Baker, Open Access News, October 20, 2008; Profile of the Personal Genome Project, Gavin Baker, Open Access News, August 06, 2008; The Personal Genome Project, George M Church, Mol Syst Biol 2005; 1: 2005.0030 [Epub 2005(Dec 13)].

Modified on October 21, 2008:

See also: From genetic privacy to open consent, Jeantine E Lunshof, Ruth Chadwick, Daniel B Vorhaus and George M Church, Nat Rev Genet 2008(May); 9(5): 406-11. Excerpts from the full text (not OA):

Box 3 | Key features of the Personal Genome Project’s open-consent policy

Open consent as part of the Personal Genome Project implies that research participants accept that:

* Their data could be included in an open-access public database.
* No guarantees are given regarding anonymity, privacy and confidentiality.
* Participation involves a certain risk of harm to themselves and their relatives.
* Participation does not benefit the participants in any tangible way.
* Compliance with monitoring of their well-being through quarterly questionnaires is required.
* Withdrawal from the study is possible at any time.
* Complete removal of data that have been available in the public domain may not be possible.

The moral goal of open consent is to obtain valid consent by effectuating veracity as a precondition for valid consent and effectuating voluntariness through strict eligibility criteria, as a precondition for substantial informed consent.

[End of Box 3]

Open consent. Open consent means that volunteers consent to unrestricted re-disclosure of data originating from a confidential relationship, namely their health records, and to unrestricted disclosure of information that emerges from any future research on their genotype–phenotype data set, the information content of which cannot be predicted. No promises of anonymity, privacy or confidentiality are made. The leading moral principle is veracity — telling the truth — which should precede autonomy. Although, in clinical medicine, veracity is the legal norm in many jurisdictions, physicians may try to justify the withholding of information by invoking the ‘therapeutic privilege’. In research, there is no such privilege, and when seeking informed consent from research subjects, distorted or incomplete information could undermine trust in researchers and in science.

Comment: Those contemplating OA to genetic data need to pay careful attention to the concept of “open consent“, and its emphasis on “telling the truth” and on “voluntariness”. It’s also noted in the full text that “in the PGP potential volunteers are strongly advised to discuss their participation with relatives“.