EXCERPT

According to [Ewan] Birney, the act of sharing data has been a tradition going back to the beginning of genetics. He points to innovations in the past century, such as the Protein Data Bank, the ENA Bank (formerly EMBL), and GenBank nucleotide collections, and the Human Genome Project as examples of instances where data sharing worked to positive, successful results. Birney is no stranger to the data sharing debate; he was appointed the joint Director of EMBL-EBI in 2015, and awarded the Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences in 2005.