A great idea – published now at PLoS ONE today and live at www.biotorrents.net– is a significant step ahead.

The transfer of scientific data has emerged as a significant challenge, as datasets continue to grow in size and demand as open access sharing increases. Current methods for file transfer do not scale well for large files and can cause long transfer times. In this study, we present BioTorrents, a website that allows open access sharing of scientific data and uses the popular BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing technology. BioTorrents allows files to be transferred rapidly due to the sharing of bandwidth across multiple institutions and provides more reliable file transfers due to the built-in error checking of the file sharing technology.

Just install a BitTorrent client, read the basics at Wikipedia, and convince your computing department Continue reading Biotorrents →