Optimising the UK’s digital research infrastructure through the power of community

The potential to transform the UK’s digital research infrastructure (DRI) to be more collaborative and federated offers an opportunity akin to the emergence of open science initiatives over 20 years ago. As a community, it is important to act now if we are to develop collaborative and federated DRI, or the opportunity cost will grow, embedding barriers further into the ecosystem.

UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) digital research infrastructure committee (DRIC) engaged Jisc to lead the development of ‘Mapping federation journeys for optimising the UK digital research infrastructure', a report which sets out opportunities for collective approaches to extending the efficiency, resilience and sustainability of DRI from the perspectives of expert research stakeholders from across the UK.

Two key strategic drivers are the acceleration of expanded DRI capacity in response to a wider range of more complex and more interconnected research domains, and increasing the scale, volume and dimensionality of data available to, and created as part of, research.

The report sets out quick wins and medium to longer-term recommendations for the sector. Below, we discuss some of them.

Representing many interests well

Some research disciplines were historically perceived to operate in low technology research landscapes relative to other disciplines, leading to much lower levels of financial investment in data, digital and technology-enabled DRI. Differing levels of investment in some disciplines may have led to the unintended consequence of missing out on innovative, technology-optimised research that could have significant scientific, social or economic impact. There is a need to equalise more, share DRI more widely, and have many interests represented well in the DRI.

Enabling a more agile infrastructure that can implement and influence technology as it develops

The potential influence of the DRI community as a whole on the direction of technology can offer transformative approaches to collaborative and federated DRI. To enable more flexibility and agility in implementing DRI, stakeholders should consider expanding hybrid funding approaches, ensuring that capital funding models are complemented by operational funding models for access to an expanded range of hardware and software for research.

This approach would support more routes to influence provision and enable more agile implementation of technology developments. This can be supported by Jisc’s programme focused on effective and sustainable procurement, and licensing routes for research technologies to meet research use cases.

Collaboration excellence

To enable the elevation of service models for running DRI and support shared and sustainable approaches, UKRI (via the DRIC) should bring together a community of experts to explore potential collaborative approaches to service management for DRI, including consolidation, skills, best practice and sustainability.

It should look to set up a collaborative centre of excellence in DRI service leadership for the long term, able to adapt to technology developments and the impact these have on service layers, as well as the benefits they bring.

Skills

To enable a focus on the skills needed to run DRI over the long term, stakeholders should commission a technology and skills strategy for the digital research infrastructure to 2040, including the impact of future technology on skills.

Open, trusted and secure research

Ensuring research is trusted and secure is critical - as is the fundamental role of DRI in it. The DRI’s role in the effective and efficient implementation of trusted and secure research cannot be overestimated. The opportunity to ensure cyber security, access, identity and collaborative approaches to trusted research environments across disciplines should be a critical focus of the sector as a whole as research becomes more complex, high capacity, multi-sector and multi-disciplinary.

Reducing research bureaucracy, supporting international collaboration and growing net zero imperatives are all increasingly critical for the DRI.

It is essential to build a community of equity, diversity and belonging through a positive culture that supports multi-sector, team-based research.

Read the full report Mapping ‘federation journeys’ for optimising the UK digital research infrastructure to learn more about the future of digital research infrastructure and more recommendations from the report.