Data Wealth, Data Poverty, Science and Cyberinfrastructure 1

Abstract 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.

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