Other Reports Sustaining biological infrastructure: an ESA workshop report Jill Petraglia Parsons and Clifford S. Duke, Ecological Society of America A workshop held in November 2010, hosted by ESA and supported by the National Science Foundation and the Meridian Institute Infrastructure is an essential part of our daily lives but doesn t always get noticed or recognized for its vital role in society. Just as roads, buildings, and utility systems support everyday operations, databases, collections, software, and field stations support and enable biological science. Over time, biological infrastructure has evolved from physical entities and printed materials to complex instrumented sites and digital resources. This evolution helps resources maintain their usability and accessibility and ensures that they continue to facilitate scientific research, education, decision-making, and innovation. Most biological infrastructure projects have been grant funded by single government agencies. Many of these agencies are now facing significant budget cuts and increased funding pressure, stimulating concern over the long-term maintenance and development of these resources. As a response to these issues, ESA hosted a workshop in November 2010 on Strategies for Sustainability of Biological Infrastructure. This workshop, with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF; Grant No. DBI-1047650) and in partnership with the Meridian Institute, brought together 15 managers of various infrastructure forms to define the problem, explore alternative funding models, identify key ingredients for sustainability, and recommend next steps. This workshop is intended to be the beginning of a series of conversations aimed at providing guidance for funders, managers, and users of biological infrastructure to ensure long-term sustainability. What does sustainable infrastructure look like? The workshop participants emphasized that sustainability is more than merely preserving content and services; it is being able to constantly adapt and innovate the resource, increasing its value to the user community over time. Other important 426 Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America
elements include resource accessibility on a long-term basis and ensuring that users know how to take full advantage of the resource. Workshop participants described a variety of obstacles to achieving sustainability. While most projects represented were primarily grant funded, everyone was striving to create additional funding opportunities, with varied success. Implementing these strategies requires a lot of time, management, and skill, which itself can be challenging. Many funders don t see infrastructure sustainability as a priority; they tend to prefer funding new initiatives rather than maintaining something that already exists. Also, with a diverse funding portfolio, revenue streams may be unpredictable, making long-term planning, expansion, and improvement of infrastructure value and facilities a challenge. One of the most common challenges experienced was the user community s aversion to fee structures. When exploring funding models that do not rely entirely on grant funding, many organizations have at least investigated some type of user fee. Depending on the resource and the user community, these discussions can result in serious backlash. In communities where free access to infrastructure is typical, significant cultural change may be necessary for a user-pays model to be successful. Participants identified several broad factors that would be important to this cultural change, listed in Appendix I. During the workshop, participants developed a list of key elements needed for infrastructure sustainability. This was also an opportunity for participants to share their successful experiences in creating more sustainable funding. Some of the strategies they implemented with positive results are included in the elements listed below. Standardization and coordination Science is becoming increasingly dependent on large volumes of data, and simultaneously there are very broad practices that are not standardized across the biological sciences community. Creating incentives for developing standards, curating data effectively, and sharing information among scientists would be a step in the right direction. Standardized protocols for data collection would help researchers use data to answer broader questions posed by other scientists and unanticipated in the original study. Likewise, establishing community information and metadata standards can help users discover resources across disciplines and conduct analyses more efficiently, increasing the data s relevance, importance, and value over time. Increased coordination within biology at a high level can help establish some critical issues for investigation, essentially developing a core message and strategic plan that determines scientific priorities. This could help create larger, more coordinated infrastructure projects, rather than lots of smaller, competing initiatives. Additional coordination could also help create more effective links with other disciplines, which can enhance data s value and allow project managers to take advantage of exciting science that is progressing rapidly in new areas. Higher levels of coordination will also enable more communication and analysis among infrastructure projects. Building partnerships with other organizations, including international ones, can open up new sources of funding and help infrastructure remain relevant and important. Partnerships can also act as Reports October 2011 427
a safety net; they can provide additional support or take up slack if needed, particularly if a resource in jeopardy is important to other projects. Understanding and assessing costs and value This is crucial to projecting and planning for the future and helps create transparency and accountability with user communities and funders. Linking costs more directly to the activities they support and thorough analysis of both ongoing, daily costs and riskier, innovative project expenses is vital for making informed decisions that enhance sustainability. A complete understanding of costs is necessary to successfully implement new financing strategies, such as charging user fees, including infrastructure costs explicitly in all grants and contracts, or spreading costs across institutions or a member network. One infrastructure project was able to begin charging commercial clients more so that academic users could pay less. Another project discovered that increasing their course offerings and the number of students per course while also lowering tuition created economies of scale and balanced the budget. Determining the value of resources can be complicated, but this can become the basis for establishing user fees or justifying other funding. For example, one suggestion during the workshop was for museum collections managers to assess the monetary value of their collections, including the costs for maintaining and improving them, as a way to document the services they provide and their value to users. Clear value proposition A clear value proposition defines who benefits from infrastructure, how they benefit, and how much. It can be used to justify why the resource is worth what it costs and provide some level of quantification. This statement can help define infrastructure products and services and convey how infrastructure addresses and supports exciting developments in the field. A value proposition is more dynamic than a mission statement; it very clearly explains an organization s value, and it changes as the needs of the user community change. A single project can have more than one value proposition, and these can be tailored for different audiences (e.g., you may have one value proposition tailored for the general public and another targeted at the scientific community). Public outreach, communication, and reaching new users These are all interrelated and vital to increasing support for and use of infrastructure. Effective outreach and communication helps articulate the resource s public benefit and conveys the project s value proposition. Field station leaders at the workshop emphasized that their sustainability depends on a steady stream of compelling cases in leading-edge science that are supported by the infrastructure. Better communication can help convey the importance of these stations, how the data are being used, and the data s potential significance for the future. Effective outreach and communication can help projects reach out to new users, strengthen networks, 428 Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America
and create new partnerships. These new, diverse connections can help generate novel ideas and revenue streams, which will ultimately increase infrastructure s value, relevance, and sustainability. Diverse revenue streams Having various sources of revenue helps create more stability; if one funding source declines, other sources may help compensate. Infrastructure can no longer rely completely on grants and contracts, and in terms of long-term sustainability, it cannot rely on only one source of funding, particularly in the current economic climate. One way to diversify revenue is to implement user fees, bearing in mind some of the challenges identified above. One project began creating and selling new software and applications, since their user community was more receptive to charges for services than user fees. Other possibilities include partnering with income-generating organizations and university libraries, using subscription and licensing schemes, developing in-kind charges for specimen identification, starting ecotourism programs at field stations, or commercializing collections. Before implementing these activities, however, it is important to consider the potential revenue opportunities along with any possible negative impacts on the resource. Ongoing, sustained stakeholder engagement Stakeholders encompass those who deposit and use data and other partners, such as independent organizations, international institutions, professional societies, and private companies. Identifying who stakeholders are and what they want is a key step to meeting user needs and keeping infrastructure relevant. Engaging stakeholders continually can be costly and time intensive, but it is also critical to a sustainable business plan. Different stakeholders need to be engaged in diverse ways and require different incentives. Finding a balance and ensuring that no stakeholders are alienated is incredibly important. One workshop participant manages a project that includes users at the decision-making level, solicits ideas from them, and uses them to help advertise and create support for new initiatives. In this case, stakeholders developed ideas that enhanced sustainability, contributed to new ideas and services that led to more diverse revenue streams, and increased the infrastructure s value and importance. One of this workshop s main objectives was to identify potential next steps for continuing this conversation and creating a more sustainable biological infrastructure. Though the ultimate goal is to move away from grant funding, this is likely to be a gradual process. Finding the time and resources to investigate new business models, reach out to others who can help, and plan for the future is time intensive and may require interim funding. Thus it is necessary to involve more government agencies in future endeavors. Agencies should consider how they serve the scientific community, what could happen if biological infrastructure ceases to exist, and how that could affect different stakeholders. It also became clear, especially when planning strategic partnerships, creating new projects, and communicating messages and value, that other sectors need to be involved. Private companies, the business community, and business programs at educational institutions have expertise in marketing, Reports October 2011 429
business planning, and finance that would be invaluable to this effort. The biological sciences community is diverse, as is the infrastructure that supports it. Projects serve a variety of audiences, provide different services, and have funding from diverse sources. A vital question is how to effectively move this conversation forward despite these nuanced differences. More information about the workshop on Strategies for Sustainability of Biological Infrastructure can be found here on the ESA Science Office website or by contacting jill@esa.org. Workshop participants and everyone in the scientific community are encouraged to share ideas and the full workshop report with their colleagues and other infrastructure projects. This workshop is only a first step; more effort and coordination is needed in order to fully address the issue of infrastructure sustainability and ensure these valuable resources can continue supporting science and fostering innovation. Appendix I: Factors important to implementing user fees successfully Obviously, what works for one project and user community won t necessarily work elsewhere, but the factors below could be a useful starting point when considering user fee implementation and may help projects be more successful in this endeavor. 1. Each project needs to analyze its own user community to determine how to implement user fees effectively. Important questions to answer include: a. What do the users value the most? b. What are they willing to pay for, and how much? For example, most users are currently more receptive to charges for software and services than they are to data access fees. c. What level of cost would be prohibitive? d. How can we make services personally useful, important, and enjoyable, so that users are willing to donate to keep the system going? 2. There is a need to involve agencies and the international community. If there are other related projects out there providing free access, competition will render any user fee model ineffective. 3. It is important to get advice from independent, external experts who are not wrapped up in the day-to-day use of the resource. Appendix II: workshop attendees Participants: George Alter Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) Ivar Babb National Association of Marine Laboratories (NAML) 430 Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America
Hank Bart Tulane University Museum of Natural History James Beach University of Kansas Natural History Museum Tony Beasley National Ecological Observation Network, Inc. (NEON) Helen Berman RCSB Protein Data Bank Ian Billick Organization of Biological Field Stations (OBFS) Mary Klein NatureServe Elizabeth Losos Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) William Michener Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) Marshall Porterfield Physiological Sensing Facility (PSF) Greg Riccardi Morphbank Allen Rodrigo National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) Barbara Thiers The New York Botanical Garden S. Randal Voss Ambystoma Genetic Stock Center NSF Representatives: Peter Arzberger Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering Reports October 2011 431
Reed Beaman Division of Biological Infrastructure Peter McCartney Division of Biological Infrastructure Sta ff: Tricia Crocker ESA Meetings Associate Clifford Duke ESA Director of Science Programs Katie Kline ESA Communications Officer Jill Petraglia Parsons ESA Science Programs Manager Jennifer Riem ESA Science Programs Coordinator Elizabeth Thompson (facilitator) Meridian Institute, Senior Mediator 432 Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America