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Dear Journal Editors:

The members of the International Advisory Committee (IAC) to the 
International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC), known 
as INSD (DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank), express their appreciation for the many 
years of successful collaboration between the INSD and the scientific 
journals. By requiring that submission of DNA sequence data to the INSD 
as a strict condition for the acceptance of a paper for publication has 
been the key to the success of the INSDC and enabled its critical role 
in biological research.
At the last IAC meeting, in May 2005, we learned that some nucleotide 
sequences have appeared in published papers without proper accession 
numbers, and could not be found in the INSDC databases.
Since the free and prompt access to published DNA sequence data through 
the INSDC databases is essential to the growth of science, we, the 
members of the IAC to the INSDC, and INSDC hereby send another request 
to all the journal editors to press authors to deposit any nucleotide 
sequence in their manuscript to one of the International Nucleotide 
Sequence Databases (DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank), and to include proper accession 
numbers upon publication. Furthermore, it would be extremely helpful to 
researchers if the submission of that DNA also included a specific 
statement within the database record indicating how readers might obtain 
a sample of the DNA from which the sequence was reported. This could be 
simply a culture collection identifier for an organism or a specific 
individual, with contact information, who could deal with requests.
INSDC has prepared a common web-site (http://www.insdc.org/) from which 
the attached policy statement and other submittal instructions can be 
retrieved.

International INSDC Advisory Committee
Signed by:
       Antoine Danchin, Institut Pasteur, Paris
       Asao Fujiyama, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo
       Ken-ichi Matsubara, DNA Chip Research Inc., Yokohama
       Richard Roberts, New England Biolabs, Beverly, MA
       Sumio Sugano, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo
       Jean Weissenbach, Genoscope, Evry
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