Comment

Network security and data integrity in academia: an assessment and a proposal for large-scale archiving

Andrew Smith1,2, Dov Greenbaum5, Shawn M Douglas1, Morrow Long3 and Mark Gerstein1,2,4*

Author Affiliations

1 Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA

2 Department of Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA

3 Information Technology Services, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA

4 Program in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA

5 University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

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Genome Biology 2005, 6:119 doi:10.1186/gb-2005-6-9-119

Published: 30 August 2005

A direct impediment to the optimal use of online databases is the increasing prevalence, severity, and toll of computer and network security incidents. Funding agencies should set up working groups that can provide essential services such as universal backup, archival storage, and mirroring of community resources, consistent with the key goal of security in academia: to preserve data and results for posterity.