To the Editor:

Thank you for your recent editorial describing an effort, initiated by the International Funders Forum, to develop a robust marker paper procedure that will provide the user community with important information about community resource projects. The concept of marker papers was originally developed at a data release meeting in 2003 (the 'Fort Lauderdale meeting'). As described in the meeting report (http://www.genome.gov/Pages/Research/WellcomeReport0303.pdf) the purpose of a marker paper is to provide information about a community resource project's plans for data release and publication by describing the following information: (i) a statement of the project's purpose; (ii) a short description of the project's experimental design and scope; (iii) a statement about the project's data quality policies; (iv) a description of the project's anticipated initial data analyses to be included in the data producers' first publication, along with the expected timeline for data generation, data release and publication of that first paper; (v) the project's data release plan, as agreed upon by the project participants and its funder(s) (where applicable), including a description of any planned publication moratorium conditions which users of the data would be asked to respect; and (vi) a contact person for the project.

As described in the recent Nature Genetics editorial, Nature Precedings is a citable archive where marker papers can now be rapidly published. We are writing now to expand upon some of the points made in the editorial.

The US National Institutes of Health has been working with Nature Precedings on a pilot effort, with the cooperation of the investigators from the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) Demonstration Projects (http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/hmp/). At present, the HMP marker papers provide information regarding items i–iv and vi above; information about data release plans and publication moratorium dates (v above) is also provided. However, we have not been able to list the entire data set for which the moratorium(a) apply because of technical reasons having to do with the structure of next-generation sequence data sets. We are still working to resolve those issues so that we can provide more complete information regarding item v above.

As a point of clarification, the NIH has not made a policy decision to require marker papers for all NIH-funded projects, as readers might conclude from the statement in the first sentence of the Nature Genetics editorial (which actually referred to the public abstracts required by the agencies rather than marker papers). At present, although most NIH-funded community resource projects are encouraged to submit marker papers, few have been published in recent years. Data producers submit, because journals choose to accept, only marker papers containing substantial early data from the project. The electronic, early publication of a concise, citable marker paper in Nature Precedings is designed to resolve this problem. We hope that this new approach to making marker papers available will foster an environment where use of data generated by community resource projects can be maximized in a way that respects, credits and does not infringe upon the intellectual interests of those whose creativity and diligence produced the data, as originally envisioned by the participants of the Fort Lauderdale meeting.