Balancing privacy and access for human genetic data

The NIH is creating a database for human genetic data that will combine strong privacy protection for research subjects, open access for researchers, and incentives for researchers to deposit their data even before publishing on it.  For more details, see yesterday's call for public comments or today's article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Sam Kean (accessible only to subscribers).  Excerpt from the Chronicle article:

The genetic information would be available on two levels. "Basic descriptive information" about each genome-wide association study would be available to the public, but the health and genetic data and some pre-analysis would be accessible only to researchers cleared by the NIH Data Access Committee. The NIH would also set up mechanisms to ensure that scientists who deposit results into the database before publication receive credit for their findings. Once results have been posted, any scientist could view them; but for a certain "grace period," only those who submitted the data could publish papers about it.