Sustainability and Governance of Web and GRID Resources in Functional Genomics
9-11 May 2005
Sankt Augustin, Germany

Organisers:

Paul van der Vet, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands
Theo Huibers, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands & KPMG Business Advisory Services, Amstelveen, Netherlands
Pierre-Alain Binz, GeneBio, Geneva, Switzerland & Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Geneva, Switzerland
Martin Hofmann, Fraunhofer Institute SCAI, Sankt Augustin, Germany

Report

Introduction

Life scientists and bioinformaticians increasingly rely on web-based resources. The number of such resources, as well as the amount of available content grows continuously. The need for efficient interoperability is becoming important. Moreover, as data propagate easily through such media, their quality and pertinence need to be monitored closely. In the context of the ESF Programme Integrated Approaches to Functional Genomics, two workshops have been organised to discuss the use of these resources, in particular for data integration. , In both, but particularly during the latter (Geneva, October 2003), it turned out that the sustainability and governance of web-based resources have become urgent issues. It costs money to set up and maintain a resource. Because biology, like any other field of scientific enquiry, is very dynamic, maintenance is labour-intensive. Users of the resource will generally want to be assured of its quality; in other words, a scheme of quality assurance has to be in place. Governance, or who is responsible for what, has to be clear for the community. A business model addresses these issues in their mutual dependence. Therefore, every resource comes with a business model, no matter whether their creators are aware of it or not.

To address the issues involved, a follow-up workshop was held at the Fraunhofer Institute at Schloss Birlinghoven, Sankt Augustin, Germany, May 2005, hosted by Martin Hofmann. The participants included the organisers of the former workshop, researchers involved in offering web services and/or using them, representatives of the publishing industry, a representative of a national funding body, and a representative of an industrial private enterprise. We chose to deviate from the standard workshop format of having talks followed by discussions and adopted a way of working that had all participants actively involved in exploring the issues. The outcome, unanimously agreed upon by the participants, can be summarised in one sentence: the risks involved in the current situation are so large that guidelines and actions are urgent.

In the invitation, the issue of business models was underlined. Briefly (actually, more a caricature), a business model explains how the mission of an institute is accomplished. It tells how incomes and expenditures are matched, it identifies risks and offers strategies to deal with them. Making a profit is not an essential ingredient of a business model. Every group, institute or company has a way to balance incomes and expenditures and to address risks, but normally only commercial firms make this model explicit. We advocate that web resource providers in bioinformatics also make their business models explicit, as a first step towards ameliorating the current high-risk situation.

Business models for resources are required to address at least the following issues: quality assurance, accessibility over particular time frames (which may range from a few years to, perhaps, decades), pricing, financing, risks, and control. These issues are addressed explicitly or implicitly by any institute that operates a resource as a vital concern: academic institutes as well as businesses. Since businesses have been operating with business models for a long time, academic institutes might learn from their experiences. Ongoing discussions on using GRID technology for eSciences underline the need for new, adequate business models for distributed knowledge resources. The workshop aimed to identify possible business models to further the ideal of a European information infrastructure for the life sciences.

The main risk for most academic resource providers is lack of funding. Their resources are created in the course of funded projects, but the very idea of project funding is at odds with sustainability because a project by definition has a limited lifetime while the resource is expected to last longer than that. Since no resource can be maintained without costs, continued availability requires a source of income. This is a difficult issue because the major funding bodies tend to give priority to funding the generation of experimental data rather than funding the structured storage of data and information in public databases, even if a portion of the budget can be allocated to the construction of such resources. Dissemination and maintenance of the information generated in the course of a functional genomics project become a problem when the project stops. Quite a number of projects have already ceased or are approaching the end of their funding period. Data, sometimes valuable data, may be lost because there is no follow-up grant or other source of income to safeguard the continued availability and maintentance of the resource. In this way, EU-funded research in functional genomics faces destruction of capital on an unprecedented scale.

Scientific Content

Session 1: Exploration of the Field

The first session started with a welcome by Martin Hofmann and a short introduction to the workshop and the way of working by Paul van der Vet.

On this opening day, we wanted to get a better grip on the subject of resources in functional genomics and their aspects. The variety of biological information available over the Web proved to be too large to admit of an adequate systematisation within an afternoon: sequences, SNPs, structures, interactions, pathways, metadata, ontologies, images, literature, and more. As pointed out by Amos Bairoch and others, from a costing point of view, there are roughly two types of data resources: repositories and curated databases. Their cost structures are entirely different. In particular, the costs for curated databases are huge compared with those of a repository, and consist largely of personnel costs. Of course, this human activity is what makes these resources so valuable.

Session 2: Business Models

The second day was devoted to business models. There were four introductions by speakers who all in one way or another are stakeholders.
Martin Hofmann (SCAI, Fraunhofer Institute, Sankt Augustin) discussed resources from the creator perspective. He provided an example of a combined wet lab/in silico experimental setup that generates data believed to be of interest to others. He also drew attention to the growing importance of clinical data. The more complex a biological phenomenon is, the more likely it is that one can find it in natural-language texts, because more complex phenomena need lots of context.
Henning Hermjakob (EBI, Cambridge, UK) highlighted the way EBI financed the often excellent resources they offer. He was aware of the dangers of project funding for infrastructure and cited the example of the resource BIND that had to change its mode of operation drastically as a result of lack of money. Quite apart from the direct disinvestment, there is indirect disinvestment which tends to be overlooked: the curators had to be laid off. Training a curator takes roughly a year or more, so that laying off trained curators to do other work constitutes a large source of disinvestment.
Geoffrey Adams (Elsevier Science) presented an overview of web resource sustainability from a business perspective, systematising the various components that make up a resource and discussing their financial aspects. He also warned scientists not to become addicted to funding, because funding may disappear, for example, when EU research priorities change.
Finally, Bernd Hägele (Swiss Federal State Secretariat for Education and Research) provided an instructive but unfortunately rare example of co-operation between a funding body and resource maintainers. The Swiss government funds the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics (SIB) not only because of the perceived quality of services and research it offers, but also because of its scientific importance and because it contributes to the visibility of Switzerland as a scientific country. The situation can be considered stable over the medium term.

In the second part of this session, participants divided into groups. Each group was asked to design a business model for a resource of their own choosing, as long as it dealt with content relevant for functional genomics researchers. We asked, more specifically, to identify the services and products offered, the customers of such products/services, and the stakeholders. In addition, we asked to identify the main cost drivers, what customers would be prepared to pay, and reasonable revenue models. Each group reported their thoughts, proposals and findings to the reunited participantsat the end of this session. One of the more striking aspects was that that almost all groups involved in setting up and maintaining data resources are also heavy users of such resources. This shows that there is a tight network of resources, and the loss of one of the nodes may well bring extra costs for the other nodes.To the surprise of quite a few participants, the circle of stakeholders proved to be quite large.

Session 3: Drawing Lessons and Identifying Possible Actions

The last session was a round table discussion with all participants about actions that could and should be undertaken. As we already said above, all participants agreed that the current situation is simply too risky. The costs of resource providers are high and are spent not only on maintaining and improving the resources but also on searching for funds. Continuation of the situation is unlikely in the majority of cases, as witnessed by the case of BIND. A number of factors that contribute to this instability were discussed.
First, as already mentioned, most resources are set up on project money, but the duration of a project is typically less than that of a resource.
Second, to fund infrastructure is not commonplace. From the funder perspective, funding resources would mean at least a partial deviation from the current practice of project funding. This has given rise to the practice of funding infrastructure in disguise, namely as if it were a new project. There are exceptions: the current surge of interest in and, hence, funding of GRID technology may be interpreted as funding infrastructure. This is not entirely true, however: from the funder perspective these projects are probably regarded as seed money to get the field going, and once it is mature, GRID funding as such will cease.
Third, unlike practitioners in some other fields, researchers in the life sciences expect IT/Web resources to be for free. This is an impediment to a structure in which users of resources pay. The US National Institutes of Health however tends to favour user payment.
Fourth, resources grow and mature. Most resources are initially built because of prospective interest. Either creation and initial maintenance of the resource is not funded at all or it is part of a funded project that uses the resource as means of communication between the project partners. When the resource proves sufficiently interesting to third parties, a growth stage sets in. The technical infrastructure is consolidated and access to the resource is improved. Data are added and a quality assessment procedure is put in place. When third parties continue to be interested in the resource, the third stage, maturity, sets in. Maturity may be accompanied by the incorporation of the resource in the service portfolio of an institute or company, either existing or created specifically around the resource. To repeat what we said earlier, no resource can survive without income. (If income is not visible, this can only mean that it is hidden by incomplete or inaccurate accounting.) Therefore, each of the three steps we have identified may end with continuation or not. Ideally, quality and scope are the factors that determine survival but in reality, of course, other factors play a role that in some circumstances may be more important than quality and scope.

Considering these four major issues and the current EU policies and funding mechanisms, the model that has users pay was judged an alternative to the current situation that merits serious consideration. Users' costs can be covered by including a sum for use of the resource on the budget of funding proposals. The EU and other funding bodies may promote this. This would also make it possible to have resources maintained by commercial publishers (Elsevier, Wiley) or semi-commercial publishers (such as learned societies), who have far more experience in cost-effective web resource offering than academic groups.
However, if users are prepared to pay at all, they will normally be prepared to pay for mature resources only. It thus turns out that a resource is at its most vulnerable in the growth stage. This is the stage in which funding bodies play a decisive role. They might design guidelines that take issues such as viability, scientific quality, scope of the resource, size of the intended audience, and other factors into consideration. A discussion about these matters would be helped enormously if there were some kind of business model that also outlines the long-term perspectives of the resource.

For any alternative to the current situation one may envisage, it is urgent that explicit business models are drawn up by resource providers. It would be nice if a platform were created for resource providers to share experiences and help each other with business models. As we have seen, resource providers themselves are heavy users of resources. Sustainability thus certainly constitutes a shared interest. Business models can serve as concrete anchors for a discussion between stakeholders about the future of the resources.