Many journals are now requiring that authors make their data publicly available, a valuable resource for other researchers. This public data can be used as preliminary studies for other experiments, compared to another researcher’s microarray data, or even reanalyzed on their own.

MIAME

MIAME standards must be met for posting data publicly, and a subset of the MIAME standard is used as a guideline for submission of microarray materials and methods information in many journals.

Public databases

•  Worldwide Depositories: GEO, ArrayExpress, SMD: Taken together, the information provided by annotation sources for a particular gene is a useful summary of knowledge about that gene.

• Institutional databases: designed for use by a specific university or lab, but available to the public.
• User hosted-sites: few or single data sets hosted by a researcher.

Using Public data

• Getting data
• Posting data

When considering analysis software, it is important to note whether it will provide tools for both accessing public data and for posting it according to MIAME standards.