 | Category: News || Secondary Category: Meetings || File ID: 73 || Last changed on: 2009-11-19 11:17:40 |
Database & Bioresource Sustainability ModelsRome 11th – 12th November 2009On 11th and 12th November CASIMIR hosted a meeting in Rome to examine the issue of long-term, primarily financial, sustainability for databases and biorepositories – mainly, but not exclusively, those containing ES cells and mice. Participants included representatives of funding agencies, policymakers, investigators, database and bioresource managers and economists drawn together to share experience, distil the problems and identify potential solutions. We drew on examples from both the animal and plant worlds, and both academic and industrial resources.We examined a range of databases and resources which have had varying degrees of success with maintaining their activities and using different business models, to see if we could find a consensus on what kind of business models work, what don"t work and what might work in the future. One key issue is whether resources will ever be viable without core support at least from not-for-profit funding agencies and organisations, how stable that funding needs to be and what the criteria are for maintaining a resource in the long term. Whose responsibility is it to maintain the public repositories of data, animals and cells on which science depends? We then looked at existing economic models for resource pricing, and with an eye on the future, what happens to resources which contain valuable data but are not viably funded. Some of the outcomes of the meeting have been reported in the Editorial (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7271/full/462252a.html) and an accompanying article (http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091118/full/462258b.html) in today"s Nature and will be reported in full shortly. Presentations from the meeting are available here: http://www.casimir.org.uk/fullstory.php?storyid=72 | |
