Data Use Policy
Our goal is to provide high quality sequence information to the research community in a timely manner. Accordingly, individual sequence read traces are submitted to the NCBI Trace Archive as soon as they have exited our quality control pipeline. Whole genome sequence assemblies are released as soon as possible following appropriate quality analysis. Our archive site contains draft versions of the genome sequence assemblies, and we ask that you understand that these represent preliminary data, subject to omissions and errors. In addition, whole genome assemblies are likely to change upon the availability of new data, and our website will document new assembly versions as they are released.
In recognition of the extensive effort that underlies these genome sequencing projects, we ask that you appropriately acknowledge the use of any preliminary data. We offer the following example for acknowledgement: "These data were produced by the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and can be obtained from ftp://genome.wustl.edu/pub/xxx", where xxx refers to the appropriate ftp directory from which the data has been obtained. Our official web address may also be used. This recommendation is in accordance with the adopted guidelines by the genome sequencing community in a statement of principles for the distribution and use of large-scale sequencing data: Community Resource Projects and the resulting NHGRI policy statement. If you have any questions regarding the use of this data, please contact us at web address: webmaster@genome.wustl.edu. We request that you contact the Director of the Sequencing Center, Richard Wilson, before publishing analyses of the sequence on a chromosome or genome scale.We welcome collaborative interaction to provide the community with improved whole genome analyses and annotations.
The Maize genome has been released in pre-publication status from the Maize Sequence Consortium. This is provided freely to be used by anyone, but they have requested that the scientific ethics of other groups publishing on this pre-publication data are respected. This is outlined in detail in the Fort Lauderdale agreement. In brief, small scale analysis, e.g., the analysis of a single locus is an expected use of the data which can be published on without any expectation of coordination. In contrast, large scale, genome-wide analysis is expected to be either coordinated with the Maize Sequence Consortium in some manner or published after the initial paper. More details on the reasoning for this and details are given in the Fort Lauderdale document.