Universities and
their libraries need
;nancial support for
data stewardship
and preservation.
Insurance Portability and Accountabil-
ity Act), or do not require broad access,
researchers may opt to retain data on a
hard drive and provide access only to
collaborators. Other types of data neces-
sitate different approaches. For example,
200 terabytes of astrophysics data from
supercomputer simulations (equal to
200 trillion bytes, or almost ;ve times
the amount of data produced in the ;rst
20 years from the Hubble Space Tele-
scope) cannot feasibly be kept on a hard
drive. Longitudinal community-data
collections such as the Panel Study of
Income Dynamics, a 40-plus-year sur-
vey of families that tracks economic, so-
cial, and health factors over individual
life spans and across generations, is now
more valuable to social scientists than
ever, and must be retained in an institu-
tional-data repository with stable ;nan-
cial support.
Some data collections, such as the
Protein Data Bank, a worldwide digi-
tal repository of information about the
three-dimensional structures of large
biological molecules, have become com-
munity resources and have garnered rea-
sonably sustainable economic support.
However, other community-data collec-
tions, such as the Arabidopsis Informa-
tion Resource, a database of genetic and
molecular-biology data for the model
plant Arabidopsis thaliana, are struggling
to identify viable sustainable economic
models.
Moving the costs of research-data
stewardship solely to the grantee, uni-
versities, or the government is not eco-
nomically viable. Grantees can generally
contribute only a small portion of their
funds to data stewardship, and only dur-
ing the project period. Retention of val-
ued research collections past the project
completion date poses a serious problem.
Universities and their libraries need ;-
nancial support for data stewardship
and preservation. They cannot absorb
the bulk of retention-worthy research
data without additional money. The
U.S. government is simply not in a posi-
tion to retain all valuable research data
for its grantees. With tight budgets for
supporting research and innovation, the
competing (and codependent) needs of ;-
nancing for research—and ;nancing for
infrastructure that supports research—
make it dif;cult for federal agencies to
adequately deal with both needs.
THE GOOD NEWS is that we are not without economic models for data stewardship. Log in to Facebook (free for users), and
the ads that appear help to pay the data
bill for the stewardship of posts, pic-
tures, and keystrokes of Facebook users.
Log in to newspaper Web sites, and your
digital subscription helps pay for online
articles, video, and audio. Visit the Pro-
tein Data Bank, and a consortium of
government agencies supports reliable
access 24/7 to this invaluable commu-
nity resource.
Francine Berman is vice president for re-
search at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and
co-chair of the National Academies Board on
Research Data and Information.
Creating Engaging Online Learning Environments that
Drive Students’ Success
Online learning has created new and unprecedented access to higher education.
It’s not surprising that 65.5 percent of CAOs in 2011 agreed that online educa-
tion is critical to their institution’s long-term strategy.
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Engaging digital assets
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