Publications Policy
The primary purpose of the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (WTCCC) is to accelerate efforts to identify genome sequence variants influencing major causes of human morbidity and mortality, through implementation and analysis of large-scale genome-wide association studies. Additional objectives include the development and validation of informatics and analytical solutions appropriate to the scale and nature of the project, as well as use of the data generated to answer important methodological and biological questions relevant to association studies in general, and in the UK in particular.
The Consortium anticipates that data generated from the project will be used by others, such as required for developing new analytical methods, in understanding patterns of polymorphism and in guiding selection of markers to map genes involved in specific diseases.
The WTCCC plans to publish several manuscripts based on this control genotype data which will focus on the following aspects:
- comparisons between the two control groups;
- extent of population stratification in UK samples;
- identification of markers informative for structure;
- comparison of alternative approaches for dealing with stratification;
- value of the use of other case groups as additional "controls";
- development of methods for imputing untyped SNPs (cross platform and beyond);
- comparison of the control data with data obtained from the following disease samples: type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, breast cancer, coronary heart disease, hypertension, bipolar disorder, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, ankylosing spondylitis, autoimmune thyroid disease, malaria and tuberculosis;
- comparison of CNVs between cases and controls.
The release of pre-publication data from large resource-generating scientific projects was the subject of a meeting held in January 2003, the "Fort Lauderdale meeting", sponsored by the Wellcome Trust. The report from that meeting can be viewed at wtd003207.pdf.
The recommendations of the Fort Lauderdale meeting address the roles and responsibilities of data producers, data users, and funders of "community resource projects", with the aim of establishing and maintaining an appropriate balance between the interests of data users in rapid access to data and the needs of data producers to receive recognition for their work.
The WTCCC has agreed to follow these data-release principles and as such, these data are being released as a "community resource project" as defined in the report of the Fort Lauderdale meeting. The conclusion from the meeting was that responsible use of the data is necessary to ensure that data producers will continue to participate in such projects, and will produce and release valuable large-scale data sets. "Responsible use" was defined as allowing the data producers to have the opportunity to publish the initial analyses using the data. The WTCCC, as data producers, aim to publish the results of the analyses outline above. We ask other users to respect this and refrain from publishing analyses of these questions which use the WTCCC data prior to the initial WTCCC publication or publications.
The WTCCC, like other large-scale genomic projects, does not consider deposition into its own database to be the equivalent of publication in a peer-reviewed journal. As such, the producers still consider them to be formally unpublished.
Authors who use data from the project must acknowledge the WTCCC using the following wording "This study makes use of data generated by the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium. A full list of the investigators who contributed to the generation of the data is available from www.wtccc.org.uk. Funding for the project was provided by the Wellcome Trust under award 076113" and cite the relevant primary WTCCC publication (details of which can be found on the WTCCC website).
Users should note that the Consortium bears no responsibility for the further analysis or interpretation of these data, over and above that published by the Consortium.
Genotype data from the control groups and some of the disease samples collections are now available - please see Access to WTCCC genotype data and samples.