Short abstract

ELIXIR, the European Research Infrastructure for life science data, will present the challenges in measuring the global significance and value of the resources it represents and its approach to impact and metrics beyond usage and citation.

Long abstract

The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures has worked for decades to build a rich ecosystem of services for scientific equipment, sample repositories, data and software. In this model, the European Commission and member states co-fund a managed portfolio of capabilities for researchers; but in a world of limited resources, choices must be made. How do we assess the value of Research Infrastructure investments? And what is the value of data in that landscape?

ELIXIR is the European Research Infrastructure for life science data, and represents the major biological data resources of 21 Member states. Among the hundreds of data resources identified, we have created a formal process to identify the most critical, the Core Data Resources. We will set out the reasoning behind that selection, the experience of curating the list and measuring its use by researchers, and the challenges of communicating their significance. One key theme is that impact goes far beyond citation and usage; to this end ELIXIR has developed an Impact Toolkit to help its resources self-assess and maximise their relevance, and a range of metrics and indicators relevant to other distributed infrastructures and large scale scientific endeavours with impact beyond the literature.