A Policy Forum in today’s issue of Science takes a look at what’s become a significant problem in the sciences: enabling and maintaing unfettered access to large collections of scientific data. Although the report focuses on the biosciences, many of the problems it describes apply to other areas of research as well. The biggest problem, however, is fairly simple: there’s no good mechanism for determining who pays for maintaining large amounts of data, which leaves existing repositories at risk of either duplicating efforts or losing funding entirely, with a resulting loss of data.

The Forum actually deals with both the data and some of the materials used to generate it, from DNA samples up to engineered mouse lines. However, the issues underlying both of these are fairly similar: it costs money to accept and maintain both data and materials and, on many levels, people are faced with a choice between funding more science and saving the science we’ve already done.

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Read the original, in all its glory, right here:
How science funding is putting scientific data at risk