Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) Web Observatory Applying Lessons from the Web to Transform the Research Data Ecosystem

Abstract

The ongoing growth in research data publication supports global intra-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary research col- laboration but the current generation of archive-centric re- search data repositories do not address some of the key prac- tical obstacles to research data sharing and re-use, specifi- cally: discovering relevant data on a global scale is time- consuming; sharing ‘live’ and streaming data is non-trivial; managing secure access to sensitive data is overly compli- cated; and, researchers are not guaranteed attribution for re-use of their own research data. These issues are keenly felt in an international network like the Worldwide Univer- sities Network (WUN) as it seeks to address major global challenges. In this paper we outline the WUN Web Obser- vatory project’s plan to overcome these obstacles and, given that these obstacles are not unique to WUN, we also pro- pose an ambitious, longer-term route to their solution at Web-scale by applying lessons from the Web itself.