The Global Biodata Coalition 2026-2030

ongoing

Life science research is increasingly data-intensive. Biodata resources that collate, curate, analyse and distribute research data across biological scales, disciplines and fields are used universally and globally. New technologies and the exponential growth of these resources create huge opportunities. Despite the critical and essential nature of this infrastructure, it lacks sustainability: it relies financially on research grants from single funding organisations, making them vulnerable to priority changes. The lack of strategic coordination between data resources and research funders has led to fragility for individual resources and the global infrastructure as a whole. A number of funding organisations established the Global Biodata Coalition (GBC) to address sustainability. Since 2020, this group has engaged stakeholders to better characterise the global biodata infrastructure, understand sustainability needs, and formulate approaches to its attainment. The GBC to date offers a rich and essential foundation to support engagement, planning and implementation across funding organisations and biodata resources, needed for longer term sustainability. This new project will build on these foundations to build the GBC in its next stage of development, which is urgently required. It will establish new governance structures for a growing GBC, with a major focus on developing a community of biodata infrastructure funders, over and above the existing (international) cooperation mechanisms. This will be driven by expanding the coordinating secretariat to reinvigorate and substantially broaden engagement with existing and potential funding organisations. This proposal will consolidate and extend work with the providers of biodata infrastructure and, critically, bring these two communities together to explore, pilot and implement new sustainability models and actions to achieve the greatest sustainability of the global biodata infrastructure.