Strategies for Economic Sustainability of Scientific Data Infrastructure

1. Strategies for Economic Sustainability of Scientific Data Infrastructure NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC)Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN)The Earth Institute, Columbia University Alex de Sherbinin Slides prepared by Robert Downs based on: Downs, R., and R. Chen. 2013. “Sustainability Science Needs Sustainable Data!” Paper presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

2. Preserve the Infrastructure for Scientific Data • Establish sustainable governance for long-term data management • Create continual, reliable, and efficient preservation capabilities • Data selection to focus limited resources on high priority data • Data that are considered valuable can be prioritized for curation • Secure sufficient rights to allow unforeseen uses • It is difficult to obtain rights when the producers are no longer available • Prepare data to enable use by future communities • Begin capturing provenance and documenting data early in the lifecycle • Establish goals for data to be prepared for preservation • Reduce expensive post-hoc data and documentation rescue efforts Sustaining data through scientific data stewardship! Source: Downs & Chen, 2013

3. Typology of Sustainability Approaches for Scientific Data Stewardship (Source: Downs & Chen, 2013) Cooperative Models • Could be dependent on reducing long-term costs • Collaborations may foster economies of scale • Institutional commitments • Cost sharing or resource sharing • Network development • Development of bilateral and multilateral sharing, backup, and mutual assistance arrangements • Commitments from stakeholder communities • Multiple stakeholders or stakeholder categories • Funding or in-kind contributions (ie; open source software development, crowd sourcing) • Incentives from funders • Short-term funding or other resources in recognition of long-term commitments Discrete Revenue Stream Models • Fees • Usage fees (commercial use fees vs. non-commercial use fees) • Depositor fees • Subscriptions • Annual or multi-year institutional subscribers (members) • Grants • To acquire a specific collection • To maintain a collection for a specified time period • Advertising or sponsorship • Amount of revenue is based on site traffic • Donations • Cultivating benefactors for collections or services • Subsidies • Direct and in-kind support from activities that benefit from data, e.g., undergraduate and graduate education See Baranski et al. (2010), Bastow and Leonelli (2010), Donker (2009), and Kintigh and Altschul (2010). See Beagrie et al., 2010; Finney, 2007; Halbert, 2009; Kwon et al., 2006; Lee, 2009; Uhlir et al., 2009; Walters et al., 2010.

4. Organizing Approaches to Data Sustainability Inter-organizational Intra-organizational Discrete Revenue Stream Models Fees Subscriptions Grants Advertising or sponsorship Donations Subsidies Incentives from funders Collaborations reducing long-term costs Cooperative Models Institutional commitments Network development Commitments from stakeholder communities Source: Downs & Chen, 2013