Why keeping big data free matters to me—and us all

I began my master’s program in biological sciences at the ripe old age of 21 with a small amount of undergraduate research under my belt and a dream of studying bioinformatics. The laboratory I joined was small, just one PhD student and two master’s students, including myself. And there just wasn’t enough funding for everyone to generate their own new data. So my adviser introduced me to the US National Institutes of Health National Center for Biotechnology Information’s Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and said everything I needed to complete my thesis was in there. The SRA, as I would learn, is a massive repository containing over 12 petabytes of data generated from sequencing experiments. And it is completely free to access. The federal government didn’t pay me a dime to do research during my master’s. But you could say that every dollar it spent to support DNA-sequencing-based research elsewhere was