Standards for microarray data: an open letter.

Abstract

A fundamental principle guiding the publication of scientific results is that the data supporting any scholarly work must be made fully available to the research community in a form that allows the basic conclusions to be evaluated independently. In the context of molecular biology, this has typically meant that authors of papers describing a newly sequenced genome, gene, or protein must deposit the primary data into a permanent, public data repository such as the sequence databases maintained by the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ), the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Similarly, we, the members of the Microarray Gene Expression Data (MGED) Society (http://www.mged.org), believe that all scholarly scientific journals should now require the submission of microarray data to public repositories as part of the process of publication. While some journals have already made this a condition of acceptance, we feel that submission requirements should be applied consistently and that journals recognize ArrayExpress (Brazma et al. 2003), Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO; Edgar et al. 2002), and the Center for Information Biology gene Expression Database (CIBEX; Ikeo et al. 2003) as acceptable public repositories. To this end, the members of the MGED Society propose the following as a new paradigm for the publication of microarray-based studies: