Better research through better infrastructure | Wonkhe | Policy Watch

"The inexorable rise of data driven methods, and the parallel rise of open research practice, mean that accessing and sharing huge amounts of data is inevitably going to be a major part of research in the future. In one sense this is a huge opportunity to lower the cost and raise the quality of research – more accessible data means that much more can be learned from a single experiment, and the ready availability of data from peers around the world means that findings can be cross-checked and replicated without having to generate new results.

More and more historical source materials are being digitised and shared through global and regional initiatives – more archives are emerging from library stacks and storage boxes to online databases and image galleries.

But resource storage and archival is a huge expense – both in terms of the raw cost of many terabytes of server and hard-disk space, and the expense of maintaining and updating records to aid discovery (there’ll be a continued marketing and awareness cost too). Current infrastructure provision is piecemeal and variable by discipline. ..."