Return on Investment Metrics for Data Repositories in Earth and Environmental Sciences

Despite a growing recognition of the importance of data to the economy and to science,
investment in repositories to manage and disseminate that data in easily accessible and
understandable ways is scarce. Keeping repository services active and up-to-date for a long
time period is difficult due to this funding situation. As a result, repositories must
continually provide proof of their value, their Return on Investment (ROI) to their
sponsors; yet doing so has always been difficult, problematic and not always successful. In this work, an analysis of approaches for assessing the ROI of several scientific
data repositories has identified various techniques that repositories use to report on the
impact and value of their data products and services. A survey of selected repositories
rated the set of metrics identified and rated each by its importance as well as the ease
with which the metric could be measured. The discussion is broken down into considerations
for calculating costs, perceived value of repositories and suggested metrics that would
allow a repository to calculate an ROI. The authors, representatives of environmental data
repositories, concluded that easily obtainable data use metrics, such as data downloads,
etc., have limited value while more informative analyses would require additional resources.