As a service unit for the UM system, and more importantly, a unit within a public state university, it is important that we follow not only MU policies and procedures, but that we establish our own to promote high quality, technically sound, reproducible science. You can read about the various policies guiding BAC, including the Terms and Conditions that are required in order to work with us. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.

Commitment to open science and reproducible research

BAC believes in open science and transparent research. Open and accessible research practices and available data increase understanding, clarity, and the impact of research. Wherever possible we use open source software tools, and are members of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, we make our code available via GitLab and Github, and strongly encourage all collaborators to publish in open-access, non-predatory journals when feasible and to make all data available to the public when the research is published.

Authorship

Personnel in research facilities provide essential services for their users and it is important and ethical to recognize their contributions to the scientific advancement of projects. All publications resulting from work carried out in BAC are expected to acknowledge support.

In addition to acknowledging the service of BAC for your project, the BAC scientists will frequently make substantial contributions to a project that merit inclusion as a co-author. Charging for services does not preclude authorship on manuscripts provided the individual has contributed to the research in a substantial way. If you are unsure if the contributions of the researcher(s) working on your project are deserving of authorship, BAC follows the guidelines of the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities for authorship credit related to the work we carry out. We strongly advise any researchers collaborating with us to review those guidelines in full and raise any questions with our team during the project design phase.

The quick guide for authorship is that if a BAC scientist contributes significantly to any two parts of a project / manuscript (funding, design, writing, editing, analyzing data, generating figures) it’s likely they have contributed substantially and should be considered for co-authorship. Remember, all members of BAC are scientists, and their work deserves to be recognized and credited as that of any other researcher.

Data management

BAC is currently developing a modern and revised Data Management Policy and scaling up infrastructure to support long-term data storage and management. It will be described here in detail once it is available. Until then, all data generated by BAC is only guaranteed to be retained for one year from the end date of the project unless otherwise discussed with staff.

Terms and conditions

Deliverables

Data is delivered in a combination of formats that matches best practices for a given analysis. If you would like additional analyses or a specialized format, please make sure to contact us to discuss your project in advance.

Exceptions:

BAC will work to generate results guided by best practices in your field. However, we cannot be responsible for undesired results due to inadequate power or experimental design if we were not consulted on the project design. Therefore, we make no guarantees on data quality or data output in these cases.

Projects are billed in these situations, even with failed or disappointing results. For this reason, we highly encourage researchers to reach out to our team in advance to make sure your study and experimental design will achieve the desired goals.

Privacy policy

Please review the University of Missouri privacy policy.

Fees

Projects are billed in these situations, even with failed or disappointing results. For this reason, we highly encourage researchers to reach out to our team in advance to make sure your study and experimental design will achieve the desired goals.