We invite interested parties to help establish an infrastructure to improve the accessibility of the ever-increasing volumes of biological data. Our objective is to prepare a white paper this autumn for consideration by the European Commission's Horizon 2020 funding call in 2013, among others.

New paradigms are needed to manage and process biological data. Good metadata descriptions for each data set will help users to locate the required facts and to make the best use of biological information.

Other infrastructural projects already exist, including the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration, the Catalogue of Life and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, but they do not yet enable access to the broad swathes of data currently available.

Members of the community who are involved in generating and using biological data need to establish priorities so that funders can then make targeted grant calls, similar to the ten-year programme reviews established in the physical sciences.

We have initiated a community consultation as an open document (see go.nature.com/tma6gm) that describes a series of topics. Volunteers are invited to open similar documents for each topic, or to create a new topic, by adding their name and the document URL to the main index. A public meeting on the initiative will be held in Brussels on 17 July this year.