Drakenstein Child Health Study Database Policy Document

January 2024

  1. The Drakenstein Child Health Study (DCHS) is a birth cohort study of 1,000 mother-child pairs led by Prof Mark Nicol and Prof Heather Zar. The overall aim is to investigate risk factors for childhood respiratory illness.
  2. A collaboration between Prof Mark Nicol and Prof Angela Brueggemann was established to investigate bacteriocins in bacterial isolates recovered from the DCHS study participants. This project is funded by the Wellcome Trust via an Investigator Award (grant number 206394/Z/17/Z) to Prof Brueggemann.
  3. The DCHS Genome Database was set up in PubMLST by Prof Angela Brueggemann and Dr Melissa Jansen van Rensburg to host bacterial isolate provenance data and genome sequences from the Drakenstein Child Health Study.
  4. Data contained within the DCHS Genome Database are private and the database is accessible only to designated users via login and password.
  5. Funding for the PubMLST databases and infrastructure is provided by the Wellcome Trust via a grant (grant number 218205/Z/19/Z) held by Co-PIs Prof Martin Maiden and Prof Angela Brueggemann at the University of Oxford.
  6. Oversight responsibilities are as follows:
    1. Prof Martin Maiden, Prof Angela Brueggemann, and Dr Keith Jolley are the management team responsible for the overall PubMLST website, databases, and infrastructure.
    2. Dr Keith Jolley is the PubMLST website and database manager.
    3. Prof Angela Brueggemann and Dr Keith Jolley are responsible for the DCHS Genome Database.
    4. The management team do not have special privileges to analyse unpublished data for research purposes without the prior consent of all data owners.
  7. Prof Mark Nicol and Prof Angela Brueggemann remain the owners of the DCHS data in the DCHS Genome Database.
  8. Data held within the DCHS Genome Database may not be provided to any third party without permission from both of the owners of the data.
  9. To use unpublished data for publication purposes (e.g. conference presentations, internet presentations or journal publications), users of the database must obtain permission from both of the owners. The PubMLST website and DCHS Genome Database must be acknowledged in all publications.
  10. The preferred format of the acknowledgement is: ‘This publication made use of the PubMLST website and the Drakenstein Child Health Study Genome Database (https://pubmlst.org/projects/drakenstein-child-health). The development and maintenance of this website and database has been funded by the Wellcome Trust.’