U.S. Falling Behind in Global Movement Toward Open Research Commons

COVID broke down traditionally siloed data collection and sharing practices in an urgent response to a global pandemic. The result was an unprecedented, collaborative effort that resulted in groundbreaking research in vaccine development, virus tracking, variant evolution, and medical treatment.

It took a global pandemic to illustrate the need for an open research commons (ORC)—or a unified system enterprise—that would support rapid-response investigations and complex research that could address global issues.

A recent article in Science highlights the fact the United States is falling behind the competition. “Around the globe, there have been aggressive responses to the need for a unified ORC—an interoperable collection of data and compute resources within both the public and private sectors that is easy to use and accessible to all.” 

The societal benefits of an ORC are enormous and would impact all aspects of research and its potential outcomes, from climate change and disaster mitigation to supply chain and health inequities.

An ORC would also tackle important issues like shared governance, common standards, and shared infrastructure. In an age when data privacy and collection are every day—and everyone’s—concerns, providing a framework for transparent and accessible data-sharing would do much to combat public suspicion.

The article calls on policy makers and research funders to drive the change. According to the authors, “The value of cooperation around technology and data broadly is beyond question.”

Although the U.S. took an initial leading step in 2013, it has since fallen behind due to a lack of leadership, coordination, and incentivization. For a country rich in data, technology, and research, there is a competitive need for the U.S. at very least to be a player in the game, if not to stay ahead. 

Phil Bourne is one of the lead authors and serves as Stephenson Dean at the School of Data Science and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia. “We’re facing unprecedented problems like global warming, pandemics, and failures of democracies,” he comments. “What we need is a much more unified approach to how we solve these problems.”

The future of innovative, cross-disciplinary research relies on establishing an open research commons. That’s a challenge when data today is siloed, fragmented, and uncommunicative across institutions and administrations.

According to Bourne, “U.S. compute resources are spread around different federal agencies that don’t talk to one another. We have capabilities in the private sector that don’t work with the public sector. What we need is a technological and cultural change to make a better world.”

The article calls for congress and administration to take action. “Other countries and regions are taking these steps. It is time for the U.S. to step up to the plate.”