Marker papers and data citation

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.