A rethink is needed on the dire situation of funding of databases across life sciences, say researchers. The past decade has seen an explosion in the number of databases and the amount of data, but there are no long-term plans for maintaining them, or providing access, they say.
The call comes as representatives of the EU’s Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure (BBMRI) prepare to meeting in Brussels next Tuesday (27 October) as the next stage of moves to create pan-European standards and infrastructure for biobanks. BBMRI represents 200 organisations, including national funding bodies, which together have a catalogue of 261 biobanks in 23 countries holding more than 16 million samples.
Sabina Leonelli, Research Fellow at Egenis – the Centre for Genomics in Society at Exeter University and Ruth Bastow of Warwick University, in the UK, have reviewed the business models currently used to ensure the long-term sustainability of these resources, and suggest a global change in funding policies is necessary.
“There is no point investing resources into collecting data, if the development of tools needed to disseminate and interpret those data is not supported,” said Leonelli. “In this sense, building appropriate cyber infrastructure is as important as preserving the privacy of patients who donate information of potential use to the biomedical sciences: if that information is not effectively used to advance research, its collection and dissemination are unwarranted.”
The authors say their report, “Sustainable digital infrastructure”, is one of the first assessments of its kind. “The past decade has seen an unprecedented explosion of data, tools and databank resources in the biological sciences, most of which can be freely accessed by researchers over the Internet,” they say.
“Access to online data has become a basic requirement for conducting scientific research, but the growth in data, databases, websites and resources has outpaced the development of mechanisms and models to fund the necessary cyber infrastructure, curation and long-term stewardship of these resources.”
“A single, viable framework for sustainable and long-term stewardship of data and resources has not emerged and no current funding model is able to meet the requirements of cyber infrastructure and data intensive research.”
“Sustained funding is needed to ensure that reliable and ready-to-use data can be found in high quality and up-to-date databases maintained by professional curators,” Leonelli said.
Funding agencies and national governments are operating under an outdated assumption that cyber infrastructure can be treated either as another branch of the research process – the value and novelty of which needs to be constantly assessed and demonstrated – or as an inexpensive service that can be outsourced to industry or users themselves.
References
Sustaining digital infrastructure
Bastow, R. and Leonelli, S.
EMBO reports 11, 730 - 734 (October 2010)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/embor.2010.145
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