ABSTRACT
The eld of biosurveillance involves the monitoring measures of diagnostic and prediagnostic activity for the purpose of nding early indications of disease outbreaks. By providing early notication of potential outbreaks, the aim is to provide public health ofcials the opportunity to respond earlier and thus more effectively. Although the eld has grown in importance and emphasis in the past several years, the research community involved in designing and evaluating monitoring algorithms has not grown as expected. A major barrier has been data accessibility: typically researchers do not have access to biosurveillance data unless they are part of a biosurveillance group. In fact, after parting from a biosurveillance group, researchers lose their data access. This means that a very limited community of academic researchers works in the eld, with a nearly impenetrable barrier to entering it (especially for statisticians or other nonmedical academics). Furthermore, the con-nement of each research group to a single source of data and the lack of data sharing across groups “leaves opportunity for scientic confounding” (Rolka, 2006).
