Building a Sustainable Database Resource for Arabidopsis and Plant Research

Databases serving academic researchers have traditionally been established and maintained through government funding. When such funding eventually comes to an end, many academic databases are maintained without further updates or become unavailable, while others transition to a for-profit subscription funding model (e.g. GeneVestigator, YPD). Loss of important research data may occur in the first case; in the second, researchers may be unwilling to voluntarily contribute their data to a for-profit enterprise. Also, access to the data in a for-profit database may become severely limited due to a relatively small pool of subscribers, decreasing its usefulness to the research community as a whole.  A third option, subscription funding under a nonprofit business model, may provide a more sustainable path for databases primarily serving academic researchers. TAIR, a model organism database for the reference plant Arabidopsis thaliana, is now pursuing subscription funding under a nonprofit model. This approach requires a careful balancing of the need to provide unique data that can bring in subscriptions against the need to maximize the usefulness of the data through sharing and reuse. Database URL: www.arabidopsis.org