If you value open data, we need your help

An appeal to EMBL-EBI users from the institute’s Directors Ewan Birney and Rolf Apweiler, and Associate Directors Jo McEntyre and Paul Flicek.

As science advances, the technology and the data infrastructure enabling it must change to respond to the growing needs of the scientific community. Today, we turn to those of you who use EMBL-EBI’s data resources to power your science, and we ask for your help in shaping the future of open data.

Please fill in the EMBL-EBI impact survey, which aims to give a clear indication of the value of open access resources hosted by the institute. Understanding the wider value of EMBL-EBI’s work enables us to maintain and develop the public data resources we offer.

If our resources have ever saved you 15 minutes, we hope you can now return the favour.

The survey closes on 31 March 2021.

Complete survey

Evaluating impact

In 2015, EMBL-EBI produced its first value and impact report, in which our users revealed that open data and services made their research significantly more efficient.

Since then, our user base has continued to grow and change, so we are now embarking on a new impact assessment. This will build on the first study, and help us shape our work over the coming years, ensuring we address the growing needs of the international scientific community.

Engaging the expertise of Neil Beagrie of Charles Beagrie Ltd. and Professor John Houghton (formerly of the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies at Victoria University in Australia), the project will explore the value of data and services hosted by EMBL-EBI.

Serving our changing user community

We are now seeing more and more researchers, bioinformaticians, geneticists, clinicians, pharmacists, from an increasing number of sectors, using the data and resources we provide. This goes beyond academia and includes industry, health, biotech, agrifood, biodiversity and more.

We are hopeful we can draw on the cooperation and goodwill of our worldwide users to get as many responses as possible, and reflect our diverse user base.

We recognise there are many demands on your time and we are very grateful to you for filling in the survey. If you want to help us even more, please share the survey with your colleagues.

For more than 25 years, EMBL-EBI has been an open portal to the world’s biological data, working to serve you, our ever-growing, wonderfully diverse community. We hope that many of you will help us articulate the value of open data by filling in our survey.

Thank you for your continued support throughout the years,

Rolf Apweiler, Ewan Birney, Jo McEntyre and Paul Flicek

Complete survey