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Report on Value of the European Bioinformatics
Institute (
I wanted to share the announcement of a recent report on the
contributions and value of the European Bioinformatics Institute.
(EMBL-EBI). This is a very unusual contribution to the literature,
attempting to estimate economic and scholarly impact of investment in
large-scale scientific infrasctructure that offers a trove of freely
accessible information globally.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
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In 2015, Charles Beagrie Ltd was commissioned by the European
Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), to study and analyse its economic
and social impact.
The EMBL- EBI, located on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton,
near Cambridge in the UK, manages public life science data on a very
large scale, making a rich resource of genome information freely
available to the global life science community.
The full report published today presents the results of the
quantitative and qualitative study of the Institute, examining the
value and impact of its work. The report highlights key findings,
including that EMBL-EBI data and services made commercial and academic
R&D significantly more efficient. This benefit to users and their
funders is estimated, at a minimum, to be worth £1 billion per annum
worldwide - equivalent to more than 20 times the direct operational
cost of EMBL-EBI.
The report should be of interest to anyone interested in the
value and impact of open data, data curation, and long-term research
data management. It is the fourth report in a series of studies that
have looked at the value of data sharing and curation across social
sciences, archaeology, atmospheric science, and now bio-informatics
and life sciences.
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