Biodiversity Information Science and Standards : Conference Abstract
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Corresponding author: Ben Scott (b.scott@nhm.ac.uk)
Received: 15 Jul 2019 | Published: 30 Jul 2019
© 2019 Ben Scott, Paul Kiddle, Sarah Vincent, Vincent Smith
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation: Scott B, Kiddle P, Vincent S, Smith VS (2019) Ending Software Boom and Bust: Lessons learnt from Scratchpads and proposals for building sustainable virtual research environments for the biodiversity research community. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 3: e38273. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.3.38273
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Scratchpads launched in 2007 and became an extremely popular resource adopted for a variety of communities. Primarily, Scratchpads are used to manage and publish biodiversity data, but many sites were organised around projects, societies and regions. Demand for Scratchpads peeked at requests for more than 80 new sites over a 3 month period in 2014. Today we have over 1000 Scratchpad sites.
This has not been a pain-free journey. In 2015 the grants funding Scratchpad support and development came to an end, and whilst the Natural History Museum, London, provided some institutional support, this was alongside several competing initiatives. For a period of nearly two years, the Scratchpads had no dedicated developers. The Scratchpads suffered from this neglect, bugs remained unfixed and the platform became increasingly unstable. This situation has now been rectified, in 2017 the Informatics Group expanded, enabling us to provide a dedicated resource to the Scratchpads again.
This has been a challenging but valuable learning experience - and one that many Virtual Research Environments (VREs) in our community have, or will, experience. Current funding models encourage a boom and bust development cycle, described by
biodiversity informatics, virtual research environment, Scratchpads, microservices, open science, standards, infrastructure, open data
Ben Scott
Biodiversity_Next 2019
Scratchpads are presently supported by the Informatics Team at the Natural History Museum, London. Aspects of this work was part funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 689909.
Natural History Museum, London.