July 7, 2017

Wide-Open accelerates release of scientific data by automatically identifying overdue datasets

Advances in genetic sequencing and other technologies have led to an explosion of biological data, and decades of openness — both spontaneous and enforced — mean that scientists routinely deposit data in online repositories. But researchers are only human and may forget to tell a repository to release the data when a paper is published.

A new tool called Wide-Open, developed by University of Washington and Microsoft researchers Maxim Grechkin, Bill Howe and Hoifung Poon, and described in an article publishing June 8 in PLOS Biology, hopes to get around this problem and help advance open science by automatically detecting datasets that are overdue for publication. Read the full article in UW Today.