The ELIXIR Core Data Resources fundamental infrastructure for the life sciences, the ELIXIR team

This resource first appeared in issue #3 on 24 Jan 2020 and has tags Technical Leadership: Data Resources, Strategy: Advocacy Resources

The ELIXIR Core Data Resources: fundamental infrastructure for the life sciences, the ELIXIR team

Funding of research computing and data resources is hard. As was pointed out in a recent blogpost at US-RSE, research infrastructure is generally funded as a project, which ends (“and they all lived happily ever after”), rather than as a product which continues to be used; “sustainability” is a word that comes up very quickly in research computing conversations.

This is a good paper that makes a familiar case for funding the component core data resources, but also points out that as linking data sets becomes more important (or combining data and computing resources, or any of those with research software, or..), one has to look not only at an individual resource but it’s place in a wider ecosystem to understand its value. Many of us are, sadly, going to have to make cases like this on an ongoing basis, so its useful to see what they chose to collect, how they collected the data, and how it was presented