Open Sources and Crowdsourcing for Combating Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases

Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) could quickly cross national borders as a result of air travel, and spread disaster and panic globally within months or even days. Traditional approaches used to characterize pathogens, such as genotyping and source tracing based on genomics, are usually performed by individual laboratories, and the results become publicly available only after they are published. This process can often delay understanding the pathogenic strain responsible for an outbreak, which in turn delays the development of prevention and control strategies. Now that Internet technology and enriched open biological datasets are available, this kind of paradox could possibly be solved by applying a crowdsourcing approach that encourages real-time data sharing and international collaboration to combat EIDs. In this review, we summarize the concept, international interactive platforms, and resources that could potentially be used in EID-associated crowdsourcing efforts. We also describe a case where open data and a crowdsourcing strategy were used successfully to respond to EIDs.