No one should be frozen out of research data networks | Times Higher Education (THE)

As someone who has worked in a number of UK academic institutions to capture research data, I estimate that around 70 per cent of research still isn’t part of a larger data infrastructure. That is especially true in the humanities – even though rich, peta-scale data sets have become the norm for many research projects in these traditionally low-tech fields. The basic problem is that research communities are granted big pots of money to support their area of research, but this does not necessarily create a true national data infrastructure. We’re still trying to stand up a lot of information independently, but it needs a lot of computational support and we’re getting to a point when we can no longer move the data around so easily. We need to distribute access rather than data. My vision is that a small proportion of every grant from UK Research and Innovation will be allocated to the creation of a national infrastructure for research data. As a trusted, not-for profit organisation, Jisc could offer a base-level connectedness that could promote collaborative and interdisciplinary working. It would create knowledge hubs where we could apply all the new technologies, from big data to AI-driven learning.