Global Biodata Coalition
The Global Biodata Coalition (GBC) is a forum for research funders to better coordinate and share approaches for the efficient management and growth of biodata resources worldwide. The GBC aims to stabilize and ensure sustainable financial support for the global biodata infrastructure and in particular to identify for prioritized long-term support a set of Global Core Biodata Resources that are crucial for sustaining the broader biodata infrastructure.
Distributed infrastructure
Life sciences—or biodata—resources are essential infrastructure for public and private research, used by scientists worldwide. Research funding organisations spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year supporting biodata resources, both directly and indirectly. These resources are growing exponentially, as they are crucial to most current and future biomedical and life sciences research and are required to store the data generated by the open access policies adopted by most funders. This infrastructure has developed piecemeal over recent decades without coordination between funders or data resource managers and as a result the infrastructure is fragmented, duplicative, fragile, and lacks a strategy for long-term sustainability.
The GBC has been formed to address these challenges, on behalf of and in collaboration with research funders, to ensure that biodata resources remain freely available to all researchers everywhere around the globe, to address the fragility and potential loss of resources that would damage both public and private research, and to share approaches for the further expansion of biodata resources.
Benefits
The Global Biodata Coalition benefits funders by coordinating more efficient spending on data resources globally, both through reducing duplicate spending on similar resources and through encouraging greater participation from all funders. Funders will also benefit from coordinated approaches in support of the open access data policies that most now require.
The GBC benefits scientists and national infrastructures through safeguarding open access scientific data and ensuring support for the data infrastructure that is crucial for all biomedical and life science research. The GBC will also be of immense benefit to industry and the commercial sector because biodata resources are used extensively in patents, drug development, diagnostics development, and other biotechnology areas.