No one should be frozen out of research data networks

It was in the Antarctic that I came to understand the importance of open science and the infrastructure that is needed to support it.

I was working at the Polar Data Centre about 10 years ago. My job was to ensure that scientific polar and cryospheric data were available to various research teams, both in the UK and in the field. I succeeded, but it struck me that such rich data should be accessible to all researchers across all disciplines, not just to a few teams from the biological and environmental research communities.

The need for open science isn’t confined to those fields, either. Quite the contrary. The many interdisciplinary challenges we face make it a requirement for all fields. The UK government’s National Data Strategy, for instance, alongside the grand research challenges of healthy ageing and sustainable food, will bring in a lot of requirements to overlay or wrap data so that we can connect various sources.

The ideal solution would, of course, be international, but that would be very hard to realise in the current climate. For the time being at least, countries such as the UK will have to address the problem in their own national silos.

Some of the barriers began to be addressed in 2013 by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Big Data Network, which brings together data that are relevant to government policymaking. Subsequent investments such as Administrative Data Research UK (ADRUK) and Health Data Research UK (HDRUK) are transforming the way researchers access the UK’s wealth of public-sector data.

However, while a lot of money is invested in some superb research assets, these assets are not all joined up. All research projects need to present a research data management plan and define a place of deposit, but that can be a local repository that lacks long-term investment in data management and curation. Many research communities are still without robust data management, and their storage plans do not have a central or federated repository strategy either at a national level or at a broader discipline level.

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. 

We would then need to leverage this baseline of investment and bring in linkages between different research communities. That way, we could meet the grand interdisciplinary challenges. We could couple oceanographic and atmospheric research to address climate change, for instance. And we could bring medical, social and biological research to other communities by extending the trusted environment they’re working in, allowing unprecedented insights into the interplay between biological and socio-economic factors.

It is the art of the possible. I believe this infrastructure will allow the UK to lay down a more coherent capability across the research landscape. Moreover, such infrastructure will increasingly be necessary in all countries that aspire to produce internationally excellent research. Anything that hampers the realisation of that aspiration will not only affect national competitiveness, it will hamper efforts to address some of the biggest challenges in human history.

Nathan Cunningham is head of research computing at the Norwich Bioscience Institutes (NBI) partnerships.