| HGMD has been publicly available via the internet since April 1996. During
this time, the database has grown considerably (from under 10,000 mutation entries
in 1996 to over 76,000 entries by January 2008). An enormous effort is required
to maintain a fully curated database of this size and to provide effective search and analysis
software tools to query the data. It is therefore vitally important to identify
sustainable long-term funding for HGMD, so that we may continue to be able to
provide this service to the scientific community for years to come.
We believe that the ideal sustainable model for the future funding of HGMD is a mixture of
income from both public and private sources. This should in principle allow us to provide
free access to academic/non-profit users alongside a subscription-based
distribution for commercial users that is marketed by a commercial company. To this
end, we have opted to market the data in collaboration with BIOBASE GmbH, our
commercial partner, while keeping a core version of HGMD available
as a free service to registered users from academic/non-profit
institutions via our Cardiff website. By insisting that commercial entities
pay for access to HGMD at the same time as providing a less up-to-date version
free of charge to registered users from academic/non-profit institutions, we believe we can continue
to allow free access to much of our mutation data, at the same time as generating income to support HGMD
from its commercial distribution.
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