Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) Web Observatory: Applying Lessons from the Web to Transform the Research Data Ecosystem

The ongoing growth in research data publication supports global intra-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary research collaboration but the current generation of archive-centric research data repositories do not address some of the key practical obstacles to research data sharing and re-use, specifically: discovering relevant data on a global scale is time-consuming; sharing `live' and streaming data is non-trivial; managing secure access to sensitive data is overly complicated; and, researchers are not guaranteed attribution for re-use of their own research data. These issues are keenly felt in an international network like the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) as it seeks to address major global challenges. In this paper we outline the WUN Web Observatory project's plan to overcome these obstacles and, given that these obstacles are not unique to WUN, we also propose an ambitious, longer-term route to their solution at Web-scale by applying lessons from the Web itself.