Funding research data management and related infrastructures.

Abstract

Research Funding Organisations (RFO) and Research Performing Organisations (RPO) throughout Europe are well aware that science and scholarship increasingly depend on infrastructures supporting sustainable Research Data Management (RDM)3 2. In two complementary surveys, the Science Europe Working Group on Research Data and the Knowledge Exchange Research Data Expert Group explored how organisations funding and performing research think and act with respect to the funding of RDM and the related infrastructures. The resulting report illustrates the diversity of the funding landscape with respect to research data in Europe and the critical challenges that this presents. The funding of RDI, enabling RDM, comes from a great variety of sources and institutions that have different responsibilities and that operate at local, national and international levels. Significant parts of the funding have particular disciplinary dimensions. The funding actors, levels and disciplines are not part of a coordinated structure. This situation presents a huge challenge to the sustainability of RDM 3. Some RFOs and most RPOs contribute to the funding of specialised data infrastructure providers, which play key roles in providing RDI and in supporting RDM. Especially among RFOs there is no generally-accepted view on who should be responsible for the sustained funding of such providers; however, providers funded by RPOs tend to focus on servicing their own organisation. As a consequence, the infrastructure providers have different perspectives on their own and others’ roles and responsibilities, which is a hindrance for effective (inter-)national and (inter-)disciplinary coordination. The many RDM services that these organisations fund, offer and use represent a wide variety, and all of these come in many flavours: local, national, international; discipline specific; and with all types of different, sometimes overlapping, beneficiaries