title: BioTorrents: a file sharing service for scientific data.
abstract: The transfer of scientific data has emerged as a significant challenge, as datasets continue to grow in size and demand for open access sharing increases. Current methods for file transfer do not scale well for large files and can cause long transfer times. In this study we present BioTorrents, a website that allows open access sharing of scientific data and uses the popular BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing technology. BioTorrents allows files to be transferred rapidly due to the sharing of bandwidth across multiple institutions and provides more reliable file transfers due to the built-in error checking of the file sharing technology. BioTorrents contains multiple features, including keyword searching, category browsing, RSS feeds, torrent comments, and a discussion forum. BioTorrents is available at http://www.biotorrents.net.
authors.affiliation: Genome Center, University of California Davis, Davis, California, United States of America. mlangille@ucdavis.edu
authors.forename: Morgan G I
authors.initials: MG
authors.lastname: Langille
authors.forename: Jonathan A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Eisen
mesh_terms: D003195:Computer Communication Networks; D003628:Database Management Systems; D016208:Databases, Factual; D001330:Electronic Data Processing; D033181:Information Dissemination; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D020407:Internet; D014584:User-Computer Interface