Australian Microbiome Initiative Communications Policy

The Australian Microbiome has a strong interest in seeing that the data and capability produced by the initiative is actively communicated to and used by the wider community both scientific and general.

• All communications (scientific or general publications and presentations) that arise from the consortium’s work will appropriately acknowledge the input of all relevant contributions. The publications should specify the collaborative nature of the project, and authorship is expected to include all those contributing significantly to the work.   ​

Add the following text to the acknowledgements:   “We would like to acknowledge the contribution of the Marine Microbes (MM) and Biomes of Australian Soil Environments (BASE) projects, through the Australian Microbiome Initiative in the generation of data used in this publication. The Australian Microbiome Initiative is supported by funding from Bioplatforms Australia and the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) through the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), the Director of National Parks with BHP, and the CSIRO”.

• Copies of communications are to be sent to the project manager (smazard@bioplatforms.com) for collection and circulated to the Consortium as appropriate.

• The Consortium reserves the right to conduct first analysis and ‘global analyses’ across these genomics reference datasets and publish the results in the scientific literature, provided this is done in a timely fashion. The Consortium Data Policy outlines the data sharing expectations and responsibilities.

• Users of Consortium data, whether members of the Consortium or not, should be aware of the publication status of the data they use and treat them accordingly. For example, all investigators, including other Consortium members, should obtain the consent of the Steering Committee before using unpublished data in their individual publications, and the data producers should not unreasonably withhold this consent.

• Investigators outside of the Consortium are free to use data generated by the initiative after the mediated access period, but are asked to follow the guidelines developed at the Ft. Lauderdale meeting[1]. Specifically, data users should cite the source of the data and should acknowledge the sample contributors and the funding partners (Bioplatforms Australia, IMOS, DNP-BHP, CSIRO). In addition, the data users are asked to recognise the interests of the data producers to publish reports on the generation and analysis of their data, as described previously. Datasets from the Australian Microbiome Initiative may be released to public databases as pre-publication data and remain unpublished until they appear in peer-reviewed publications. Outside investigators who perform an in-depth analysis of data and are interested in publishing a report before the data producers do so should discuss their results with the data producer(s) and are encouraged to establish collaborations.

For further information contact

Anna Fitzgerald (afitzgerald@bioplatforms.com) (Bioplatforms Australia on behalf of the Australian Microbiome initiative and founding partners)

[1] http://www.sanger.ac.uk/legal/assets/fortlauderdalereport.pdf