sharon sanders
Editor-in-Chief & President
- NEWS EXPLAINER
- 04 May 2023
The most popular repository for sharing SARS-CoV-2 sequence data has come under increasing scrutiny. Scientists and funders around the world must now consider what lies ahead for the open sharing of genome data.
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GISAID originally intended to enforce data sharing limits only temporarily. Bogner, an entrepreneur based in Santa Monica, California, and the scientists who first presented the idea stated that the sequences submitted to GISAID would be deposited in fully open data repositories such as GenBank, “with a maximum delay of six months”.
That promise was never fulfilled, however.
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The GISAID compliance policy seems to have grey areas, which ultimately raise more questions and doubts,” wrote Scaria and Jolly in a joint statement to Nature.
The Science story describes episodes of scientists losing access to GISAID in apparent retaliation for public criticism of the platform, claims which GISAID refutes. It also discusses Bogner’s unconventional background and financial disputes with a vendor providing services to GISAID. “The revelations in the article are pretty shocking. And I do think that they highlight some real concerns about GISAID, and in particular GISAID’s governance,” says Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Bern.
GISAID says the organization has “never taken any retaliatory action or imposed suspensions” for any reason other than violations of its terms and conditions. It adds that its processes could be improved: “As part of our steps to address governance and operating structure, we consider it a top priority to ensure a fair process for appeals and address the concerns of our users around suspensions.”
GISAID’s governance page lists a scientific advisory council of 12 people, but it is unclear how the council operates. In practice, according to sources close to the platform, Bogner seems to make most decisions. “If you have massively important data sets that have untransparent governance structures that allow for unpredictable retaliation and erratic behaviour, that’s just not the way that a level playing field should work,” says biologist Amber Hartman Scholz, head of the science policy department at Leibniz Institute DSMZ, a collection of microorganisms and cell cultures, in Brunswick, Germany.
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What are the possible ways forward?
Despite the problems, the scientists agree that GISAID is likely to remain an important resource for viral genomes. “It’s in the best interest of public health that GISAID and the innovations it has promoted over the past years survive,” says Brito. Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at LSU Health Shreveport in Louisiana, agrees. “To lose GISAID would be unequivocally a tragedy.”
But if GISAID is to have a future, it requires drastic reform and new leadership, its critics say. “A new and transparent governance structure is required, and one that should not be at the whim of a single individual,” says Holmes. That would translate into having clear criteria on who gets access to the platform and which actions would result in sanctions.
The platform also needs to provide mechanisms for scientists submitting sequences to release their data to public-domain archives if they want to do so, says Sanderson. Furthermore, the scientists urge GISAID to acknowledge when the platform collects data from public data sets and to clearly identify those sequences. Currently, scientists who download data from multiple platforms can’t verify whether they are working with duplicate sequences.
To implement those changes, GISAID would need to ideally bring in outside experts in ethics and governance, says Kamil. That would require Bogner to “hand over the keys and back off”, Kamil says.
more....https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01517-9
