 The International Council of Scientific Unions (now the International Council for Science) oversees several World Data Centres with the mandate to minimize the risk of data loss and to maximize data accessibility.While the open-science-data movement long predates the Internet, the availability of fast, ubiquitous networking has significantly changed the context of Open science data, since publishing or obtaining data has become much less expensive and time-consuming.The Human Genome Project was a major initiative that exemplified the power of open data.