Sharing gene expression data: an array of options.

Sharing of microarray data has many advantages for the scientific and biomedical community, and should be advocated by neuroscience journals. The goals of sharing are manifold, and include improving analysis and confidence in results, and facilitating global comparisons between experiments, while at the same time, not penalizing those who share. The sharing of microarray data poses unique challenges relative to more generic data such as DNA sequences. These challenges are surmountable, and various sharing formats are possible. Centralized non-commercial databases are being developed to facilitate this process.