ICGC and the Development of Controlled Access Policies Controlled access mechanisms may be viewed as the product of dual imperatives: 1) the legal and ethical requirements of regulators and research ethics committees, as well as research funders and study participants, to protect the confidentiality of data from re-identification and misuse by third parties; and 2) pressure, largely from within the science community, to protect data-producing investigators from acts of free riding by other members of the community (e.g., by ensuring they are properly acknowledged in publications and that no parasitic patents are deposited on the data by subsequent data users). Early models of databases having a two-tiered open/controlled access system included the database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP) at the US National Institutes of Health (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gap), the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (WTCCC) (http://www.wtccc.org.uk/), the Malaria Genomic Epidemiology Network (MalariaGEN) (http://www.malariagen.net/), and the European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA) (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ega/).