Toward a better understanding of data provisioning in open access biodiversity portals

Presenter: Ute Brady, Arizona State University
Abstract: With the rise of big data, scientific data portals represent critical infrastructure to address a range of governance issues for science and society, and they are widely recognized as essential to scientific inquiry, economic innovation, and decision-making. However, the public funding that is often used to kickstart scientific portals is time-limited and dependent on voluntary contributions to support long-term data contribution and maintenance (hereinafter “provisioning”) activities. Despite the fragility created by this built-in dependence, systematic research into the institutional (rule) arrangements that govern portal provisioning activities and how they may interact with data characteristics and other social/technical infrastructures is sparse. We address this gap by utilizing the Institutional Grammar (IG) to code the formal data provisioning rules in four biodiversity portals; GenBank, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the SouthEast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections (SERNEC), and iNaturalist. We expanded the definitions of Ostrom’s regulative institutional rule typologies to constitutive rules and identified key deontic/modal characteristics to holistically explore how each portal parameterized its data provisioning system (constitutive rules) and guided actor provisioning behavior (regulative rules). Study findings highlighted, in particular, that the biophysical characteristics of digital and physical vouchers, and the associated potential to generate new data, may influence the pool of actors motivated to contribute and maintain portal data. Our study contributes to data commons research and provides the foundation for future research into long-enduring data-provisioning governance structures that may be of interest to scholars and decision-makers. (Co-authored with Beckett Sterner, Arizona State University, and Zoe Nyssa, Purdue University)