  Public data archives are the backbone of modern biological and biomedical
research. While archives for biological molecules and structures are
well-established, resources for imaging data do not yet cover the full range of
spatial and temporal scales or application domains used by the scientific
community. In the last few years, the technical barriers to building such
resources have been solved and the first examples of scientific outputs from
public image data resources, often through linkage to existing molecular
resources, have been published. Using the successes of existing biomolecular
resources as a guide, we present the rationale and principles for the
construction of image data archives and databases that will be the foundation
of the next revolution in biological and biomedical informatics and discovery.
