Authors
Angelo Romasanta, ESADE Business School.
Jonathan Wareham, ESADE Business School
Abstract
Despite the many promises of cloud computing in science, its full potential is yet to be unlocked due to the lack of findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) data. To investigate the barriers and promises of FAIR data, we explore the Science Mesh, a federated mesh infrastructure enabling interoperability across research cloud service providers. As a starting point, the project will connect 300,000+ researchers from eight providers across Europe, Australia and beyond. Through our analysis of the Science Mesh, we frame FAIR data as a collective action problem permeating across two levels: researchers downstream and cloud service providers upstream. On one hand, the scientific community would be better off if researchers made their data FAIR, yet misaligned incentives hinder this. On the other hand, cloud providers are also not incentivized to pursue interoperability with other providers, despite its benefits to users. By addressing these two dilemmas towards FAIR data, the Science Mesh promises to unlock new ways of collaborating through frictionless sync and share, remote data analysis and collaborative applications
