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When GOLD was initiated on
1997, the goal was the tracking of a few dozen genomes, clearly
for personal information. At that point, we could never imagine
that the database would have continued uninterruptedly for 10
years providing up-to-date and structured information
on genome sequencing projects. During this time, the expectation
always was that a more robust database with a better and more
accurate tracking system will sooner or later appear, and this
effort will naturally become redundant and disappear. This did
not happen so far though, and meanwhile the encouragement and
support of the community has grown so large, that it became very
difficult to interrupt the project, even due to lack of
sufficient funds.
Indeed, with the exception of
a small scale support by DOE on 2006, GOLD has been maintained
and developed mostly based on the volunteer work of its small
team over the last 6 years. At this
point however, the need for curation and further development of
the database in order to cope with the increasing demands, has
grown so big, that it is impossible to continue without
additional support.
The short sightedness of most
funding agencies in recognizing the need for supporting the
maintenance and constant curation of already existing databases (which is
vital for this type of work), is turning us to look for public
support for the continuation of this project.
This will occur with seeking
public donations (coming soon) and placement of advertisement programs
(Google AdSense)
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Repeated attempts to receive
support from various funding agencies for expanding the
database, were turned down. A notable case was from the National
Science Foundation (NSF) which
has a special funding program for Biological Databases. NSF
turned down a proposal for further development of GOLD, on the
notion that (a) all the information provided by the database is
available at NCBI and (b) the general policy is to fund new
rather that already available databases. |
