Data Wealth, Data Poverty, Science and Cyberinfrastructure

Changes in access to data are leading to rapid 'data wealth' in some scientific fields, even as others remain 'data-poor'. Furthermore, the current attention towards developing computer-based infrastructures and digital access to common data sets—the basics of scientific 'cyberinfrastructures'—are too-focused on fields of study characterized by data wealth. To better understand the implications of this twin pursuit of data wealth and cyberinfrastructure, I articulate how data-poor scholarly fields differ from data-rich fields. I then suggest four actions that scholars in data-poor fields can take to improve their work's value to science and society in lieu of being data-rich and propose three design considerations for cyberinfrastructures that can better support data-poor scholarly endeavors.