As the National Center for Biotechnology Information's Sequence Read Archive is to be shuttered, the editors at Genome Biology asked researchers give their views on the short-term and long-term impact of that closure as "there seems to be a certain amount of confusion in the community about what effect this decision will have." David Lipman from NCBI says that the agency thinks it can "support a static, unmonitored public archive for 12 months" and EBI's Paul Flicek adds that his institute mirrors the SRA data and it will be available there.
While the University of Maryland's Steven Salzberg says that centralized repositories are "far more efficient" than having data scattered about in different databases, others aren't hopeful that they can continue. The University of Colorado's Rob Knight says that "in some ways a central repository doesn't make sense" and that any repository may run into the same problems as SRA. And due to the sheer size of files, Yale's Mark Gerstein says that "the model of a central archive may need to be revisited and we may see in the future an increased use of cloud computing resources."