Open access to flu data is a matter of life and death

I cherry-picked this excerpt from Peter Suber's excellent Open Access News blog--jon.

Glyn Moody, Will Data Hoarding Cost 150 Million Lives? Open..., March 14, 2006.
http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2006/03/will-data-hoarding-cost-150-million.html

The only thing separating mankind from a pandemic that could kill 150 million people are a few changes in the RNA of the H5N1 avian 'flu virus. Those changes would make it easier for the virus to infect and pass between humans, rather than
birds....The good news is that with modern sequencing technologies it is possible to track those changes as they happen, and to use this information to start preparing vaccines that are most likely to be effective against any eventual pandemic
virus....The bad news is that most of those vital sequences are being kept hidden away by the various national laboratories that produce them. As a result, thousands of scientists outside those organisations do not have the full picture of how the
H5N1 virus is evolving, medical communities cannot plan properly for a pandemic, and drug companies are hamstrung in their efforts to develop effective vaccines. The apparent reason for the hoarding - because some scientists want to be able to
publish their results in slow-moving printed journals first so as to be sure that they are accorded full credit by their peers - beggars belief against a background of growing pandemic peril. Open access to data never looked more imperative.