To share is to be a scientist

“A data file itself is really pointless,” says Freeberg. Data need associated information, which might be about the phenotype or disease or sample quality, and it’s crucial to data sharing. In the case of organoids, metadata might include how the organoid was grown or collected. With human data, metadata can include an individual’s demographic and health information. “We definitely see this expanding in the human genomic space,” she says. When they have new data for a specific dataset, researchers can append the previous data and metadata. Metadata standards emerge from…