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.
A full press release accompanying today’s publication is available on the EMBL-EBI website at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/press-releases/value-and-impact-of-the-european-bioinformatics-institute
The Report is available online in printable format at http://www.beagrie.com/EBI-impact-report.pdf
A short Executive Summary version of the report is available online in printable format at http://www.beagrie.com/EBI-impact-summary.pdf