Public infrastructures like roads and electricity are so essential to society that people almost take their value for granted. A new report by Frontier Economics, commissioned by EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), shows that open data resources have become a similarly essential infrastructure for life sciences worldwide.
EMBL-EBI is a global leader in the storage, analysis, and dissemination of large biological datasets across scales and disciplines. The open data resources EMBL-EBI manages support growing numbers of scientists and innovators in academia and industry.
This is the third independent economic assessment of these resources. First introduced in 2016 and updated in 2021, the report builds a unique decade-long picture of how life scientists use and value EMBL-EBI data resources. It shows a diversification of users and a tripling of the returns on research and development enabled by these resources. The findings are indicative of the broader value of open data in the life sciences.
"Most EMBL-EBI data resources exist thanks to global collaborations and joint funding," said Jo McEntyre, Interim Director of EMBL-EBI. "No single institute or country can manage the scale of today's biological data. This vital shared infrastructure enables breakthroughs across science, medicine, and biotechnology, but its continued impact relies on stable, long-term investment. We are incredibly grateful to our funders, collaborators, and users for their support and the trust they place in EMBL-EBI."
Enabling productivity gains
The report combines anonymised web access data with a global survey of over 2,500 EMBL-EBI data resource users across the public and private sectors. It estimates that EMBL-EBI enables productivity gains worth £11.8bn per year, driven by average savings of 11 hours per user, per week.
By providing open access to vast volumes of high-quality, expertly curated data, EMBL-EBI resources reduce duplication of effort across the life sciences.
They remove the need for scientists to repeatedly generate the same datasets, freeing up time and funding to focus on new discoveries.
The report highlighted that 71% of respondents say EMBL-EBI enables work that would otherwise be impossible or require significant additional time and effort. This underlies the institute's critical role in the global research ecosystem.
Powering AI-driven science and innovation at scale
The report found that EMBL-EBI data resources are catalysing a growing global research and innovation ecosystem. More than a third of survey respondents said they build new tools and databases on top of EMBL-EBI data resources, extending their value and usage across different disciplines.
This role is increasingly important in the era of AI-driven science, where access to high-quality training data is essential. Indeed, 42% of survey respondents said that EMBL-EBI data resources contribute to AI and machine learning model development.
A leading example of this is Google DeepMind's AlphaFold 2, an AI-based system which accurately predicts the structure of proteins. This information is important for understanding the biology of disease, and for developing new drugs and treatments.
AlphaFold was trained on public data resources, including those managed by EMBL-EBI. Crucially, EMBL-EBI worked with Google DeepMind to make over 200 million protein structure predictions openly available to the global scientific community via the AlphaFold Database. The report studied the impact of the database and found that it had widened access to the algorithm's predictions for a more diverse array of research fields, and likely increased the total volume of research.
"Estimating the value and socio-economic impacts of open data resources is not easy," said Thomas Badger from Frontier Economics . "Our conservative calculations show that EMBL-EBI data resources deliver substantial and growing benefits to users and society. They support a global research community, enabling work that would otherwise not be possible, and save researchers a significant amount of time."
Read the full report on the EMBL-EBI website to find out more.
EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)
EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) is a global leader in the storage, analysis and dissemination of large biological datasets. We help scientists realise the potential of big data by enhancing their ability to exploit complex information to make discoveries that benefit humankind.
We are at the forefront of computational biology research, with work spanning sequence analysis methods, multi-dimensional statistical analysis and data-driven biological discovery, from plant biology to mammalian development and disease.
We are part of EMBL and are located on the Wellcome Genome Campus, one of the world's largest concentrations of scientific and technical expertise in genomics.
Website: www.ebi.ac.uk
