[open-science] openSNP

Sat Dec 3 16:02:00 UTC 2011

Hi,
I'm one of the founders of openSNP and up to now i've been a more or less quiet reader of this list. But I think I can give some more information about our project. It is great to see that it gets discussed here. 

I've read Misha Angrist's “Here is a human being”, so I know about the PGP and I'm also an avid reader of GU. And in a way both were a huge motivation for our work on openSNP. The PGP is a huge and wonderful project and there is no problem with their licensing schemes. But the "problem" is that they don't offer a way to participate for everyone (and up to now they have no way to filter and easily download the data, a thing that is needed to make the data usable). 

Similarly GU does not offer a way to participate for everyone, while those don't offer phenotypic information which is needed for association studies. So basically openSNP was born out of the idea that I also wanted to be able to share my genetic/phenotypic information in order to be able to make it usable for other scientists. 

We think that open science should not only mean that the data itself is shared under open licenses. But that it should also be possible for everybody to actively participate in the science. So I think this is a difference between the PGP, GU and openSNP. Besides this: We are in contact with John Wilbanks of weconsent and GU, because we also think that it would be a good thing to use synergetic effects.

Cheers,
Bastian

Am 03.12.2011 um 15:38 schrieb Paweł Szczęsny:

> Hi Jenny,
> 
> Personal Genome Project (http://www.personalgenomes.org/ ) is much
> older (PGP is five years old, see
> http://www.nature.com/msb/journal/v1/n1/full/msb4100040.html ). There
> are few other similar projects developed later, for example Genomes
> Unzipped. Both PGP and GU use CC0 for data and PGP has phenotypic data
> available as well.
> 
> Given the licensing, having more of such services like OpenSNP, PGP,
> GU or whatever else is actually a good idea. You could present the
> idea and gather data from culturally different societes (apparently
> none of expert judges had any knowledge in the field - neither PGP or
> GU is targeted at people outside of personalized medicine/genomics).
> 
> Cheers
> PS
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 2:49 PM, Jenny Molloy <jenny.molloy at okfn.org> wrote:
>> Hi All
>> 
>> I cam across this story on Nature news
>> (http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/12/could_crowd_sourcing_provide_t.html ).
>> In an interesting combination of crowd sourcing and open data release,
>> openSNP encourages users of personal genome services (23andMe, deCode me
>> etc) to openly publish their results alongside phenotypic data that they
>> provide to the site. All data is available under a CC0 license, so is
>> completely compatible with the Open Knowledge Definition and the Panton
>> Principles. Is there anyone on the list who has been genotyped and would
>> like to comment on what they think of the idea?
>> 
>> From the website http://opensnp.org/:
>> 
>> Why all this?
>> 
>> openSNP is a non-profit, open-source project that is about sharing genetical
>> and phenotypic information. The idea to this project came to Bastian after
>> he was genotyped by 23andMe in May and started playing around with his data.
>> During his research he became frustrated, because it was not that easy to
>> find mode data. He started working on openSNP to fix this. To be clear: This
>> project is not about making money, selling data or to quote Google: “We
>> don’t wanna be evil”. We are just interested in making science more open and
>> accessible.
>> 
>> Jenny
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> open-science mailing list
>> open-science at lists.okfn.org
>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-science
>> 
> 
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