VICC Principles and Policies

The VICC is an open consortium, founded on the belief that biomedical knowledge is intended to be shared for the benefit of all. As an organization that welcomes all interested participants, we have developed the following guidelines for conduct and participation to lay the groundwork for common understanding and practice in our shared endeavors.

VICC Policies

• Standards for Professional Conduct (Approved)
• Authorship Policy (Approved)
• Project Submission and Review Policy (Approved)
  • (Submit a Project proposal)

VICC Knowledge Sharing Principles

• While each individual knowledgebase will likely continue to exist to service the specific needs of each institution, there is clear value and necessity in sharing knowledge of cancer type-variant associations. Such sharing will increase confidence where interpretations overlap, fill gaps, reduce redundancy, and leverage disparate domain expertise.
• A minimal set of data elements for sharing interpretations is required. Each institute will commit to including at least these minimal elements in their curation data model.
• Each institute will share all or a significant proportion of interpretations (with at least the minimal required data elements) accumulated by their current curation efforts. This will require releasing content under permissive licenses (free and non-exclusive for at least research use) and providing documented public APIs for data access.
• Building on software developed for independent efforts will be critical to create a community resource. Therefore, software will be released in public repositories with open source licenses.
• To avoid patient data privacy concerns, the project will focus initially on clinical interpretations derived from published findings (literature, conference proceedings, and clinical trial records), not individual patient/variant-level observations.
• Data sharing will be facilitated by use of appropriate schemas, APIs, and demonstration implementations in accordance with the recommendations of the respective workstreams for determining those standards.
• The VICC will make available bulk downloads of all integrated knowledgebase interpretations to facilitate data mining.

If you represent a resource that will abide by these principles and is interested in participating as a formal data partner of the VICC, please consider signing a Letter of Support.