205-2 Regarding Resilience of Community Databases

Session: MSA 2025 Awards Lectures and Presidential Address

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Over the past 20+ years, the science community has increasingly come to appreciate the benefits of large curated databases such as EarthChem, GEOROC, Astromat, RRUFF, and others that provide easy online access to a vast corpus of observations and measurements made on minerals and/or rocks in the field and in the lab. Decades of published data have been amassed into these databases, facilitating new generations of research, providing a common reference framework for thousands of studies, and making research more efficient. They have enabled transparent and reproducible (re)use and analysis of data, informed peer review, and allowed the community to assess the context and significance of new data and new models that are calibrated using the data. The relevance of these databases has grown even more in our era of AI, ML, and other computational approaches. 

Unfortunately, the sustainability of these community databases has always been fragile because they are funded through limited research grants awarded by federal agencies that need to be recompeted every 3 to 5 years. Funding gaps or termination of funding are possible and have indeed happened. Sustainability so far (PetDB and GEOROC celebrated their 25^th anniversary in 2024) was achieved because the databases have provided valuable services to the research community that ensured support and favorable reviews of their funding proposals. Today, as drastic reductions to science funding are looming, the threats to the existence of the databases have dramatically increased and database providers need to develop sustainability plans with business models that minimize dependence on funding provided by federal agencies and technical and organizational solutions that ensure persistent access to the hosted data in case operations have to shut down.  

EarthChem and GEOROC recently issued a Call to Action [1] to bring researchers, scientific societies and unions, as well as the commercial sector together to ensure that curated databases can be sustained in the future. This presentation will describe ideas and initial actions taken to implement more efficient and effective operation, persistence of data, and innovative business models.

[1] Elements Parting Shot "CALL TO ACTION: Securing Sustainable Access to Geochemical Data … or we will have a graveyard of geochemical databases". June 2025 - Volume 21, Number 3

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Program. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-10794

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