COLLABORATION IN CANCER RESEARCH COMMUNITY: CANCER BIOMEDICAL INFORMATICS GRID (caBIG) - Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research - page 263

sonalized medicine paradigm and modern biomedical research. Ultimately,
caBIG is a model that is extensible to other research and care communities
to enable the large-scale collaborations that are needed in the fi ght against
complex disease.

17.2 ca BIG COLLABORATION STRATEGY: OVERVIEW

As described in the introduction, the collaboration strategy taken by caBIG ®
involved two major components: providing the technical infrastructure
required in a large-scale collaborative effort and working with the community
to remove the social barriers associated with such collaborations. In order to
accomplish these two goals, caBIG adopted a set of core principles [3] to guide
its activities:

Open Access The caBIG program is open to all, enabling access to tools,
data, and other infrastructure by the biomedical research community.
Open Development All caBIG software development is driven by the
needs of the cancer research community as defi ned by caBIG partici-
pants. Although these projects are built by designated teams, all artifacts,
from use cases to software to test and bug logs are publically available
to all.
Open Source All caBIG products that are created using National Cancer
Institute (NCI) funding are released under a nonviral open-source
license.* This license is designed to enable the creation of both open- and
closed-source derivative works and explicitly allows for commercializa-
tion of products that are based on caBIG technology.
Federation Ultimately, by providing an interoperable infrastructure,
caBIG allows information to remain under the control of those that are
responsible for its integrity and security while still enabling the sharing
that is required for personalized medicine. The analogy is to the federal
system of government in the United States, with the central government
providing a set of capstone policies and regulating interstate trade while
leaving other powers to the states. Similarly, caBIG provides a set of
standards to enable sharing while ensuring that data providers have
ultimate control over their information.

Ultimately, caBIG is about meeting the needs of the oncology and biomedical
research community, and while actively managed by the NCI, its priorities and

* In the context of open source, a viral license is one that places restrictions on “derivative works,”
that is, software that uses or extends the open-source software. The GNU Public License (GPL)
is a viral license in the sense that all derivative works are made open source by virtue of the terms
in the license of the original work. The terms of a nonviral license do not pass through to deriva-
tive works, so that the derivative work can be open source or closed source at the discretion of
the developer of the derivative product.