Although challenges exist in leveraging PHD for research, there are many opportunities for stakeholder engagement, and experimentation with these data is already taking place. These early examples foreshadow a much larger set of activities with the potential to positively transform how health research is conducted.

This paper investigates the work of creating infrastructure, using as a case study the development of cyberinfrastructure for metagenomics research. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the role of embeddedness in infrastructure development. We expand on the notion of human infrastructure to develop the concepts of synergizing, leveraging, and aligning, which denote the active processes of creating and managing relationships among people, organizations, and technologies in the creation of cyberinfrastructure. This conceptual lens highlights how embeddedness is not only an important result of infrastructure development, but is also a precursor that can act as both a constraint and a resource for development activities.

The co-authors of this paper hereby state their intention to work together to launch the Genomic Observatories Network (GOs Network) for which this document will serve as its Founding Charter. We define a Genomic Observatory as an ecosystem and/or site subject to long-term scientific research, including (but not limited to) the sustained study of genomic biodiversity from single-celled microbes to multicellular organisms.An international group of 64 scientists first published the call for a global network of Genomic Observatories in January 2012. The vision for such a network was expanded in a subsequent paper and developed over a series of meetings in Bremen (Germany), Shenzhen (China), Moorea (French Polynesia), Oxford (UK), Pacific Grove (California, USA), Washington (DC, USA), and London (UK). While this community-building process continues, here we express our mutual intent to establish the GOs Network formally, and to describe our shared vision for its future. The views expressed here are ours alone as individual scientists, and do not necessarily represent those of the institutions with which we are affiliated.