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Short abstract:

This paper discusses equity within data practices in the life sciences by exploring the case of biocuration. Sensitised by the notion of epistemic injustice, it discusses how biocuration is increasingly organised as a scholarly community, and describes the geographies and practices involved in it.

Long abstract:

This paper discusses equity within data practices in the life sciences by exploring the ways in which biocuration – the extraction of “knowledge from biological data and [its conversion] into a structured, computable form” (Quaglia et al 2022) – is developing as a professional and scholarly community. Based on interviews with biocurators around the world and on ongoing ethnographic with the field, the paper makes three moves. First, I outline how biocurators are seeking to organise as a community, and why they see it as urgent to do so: their work is framed as being central to the contemporary biosciences, but simultaneously precarious, and often entirely invisible to its users. Second, I use the notion of epistemic (in)justice (cf. Milan & Treré 2019) to reflect on how and why curation may be devalued in science, arguing that recognising the epistemic value of the practices involved in curation could help build more equitable research systems. Finally, I reflect on the geographies of biocuration, its place in global research infrastructures, and uneven locations of agency within these. The paper thus seeks to contribute to discussions of open data by outlining some of the diverse forms of work that lie behind data sharing in the life sciences, and by highlighting inequity in how different aspects of this work may be (de)valued.