Welcome and Keynote – Geoff Bilder, Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef

If we funded and ran physical infrastructure the way we fund and run scholarly cyberinfrastructure, the lights and water would go out every grant cycle and we would have architects bidding to build quonsets huts with the promise that the client would get railways and electrical grids as side-effects. Funders gather their top researchers to plot the disruption of scholarly communication and to frame the glorious future of e-science, yet these meetings routinely descend into jeremiads about lack of archive space, ineffective or absent identifier systems and scandalously scanty metadata. The sublime capitulates to the mundane. Now we are told that the solution to our cyberinfrastructure problems to engage in public/private partnerships. It would appear that we are running headlong from opening content and data to enclosing the very infrastructure that will allow us to us it freely. Why are we so crap at infrastructure? How can we get it right for a change? This talk will discuss some emerging patterns of successful cyberinfrasture projects and will finish by proposing some principles that might guide the future funding, development, operation and governance of critical cyberinfrastructure.