“Ross Hardison, the T. Ming Chu professor of biochemistry and
molecular biology at Penn State and one of the principal
investigators of the ENCODE Project team, explained that the
philosophy behind the project is one of scientific openness,
transparency and collaboration across subdisciplines. ENCODE comes
on the heels of the now-complete Human Genome Project — a
13-year effort aimed at identifying all the approximately 20,000 to
25,000 genes in human DNA — which also was based on the
belief in open-source data sharing to further scientific discovery
and public understanding of science. The ENCODE Project has
accomplished this goal by publishing its database at
http://genome.ucsc.edu/ENCODE, and by posting tools to facilitate
data use at http://encodeproject.org.”