Data in Turbulent Times - How Resilient is Your Repository?
This EGU Town Hall invites the community to come together for an open, interactive discussion on the resilience of data repositories in these turbulent times. Rather than traditional presentations, this format fosters direct engagement among researchers, repository operators, domain scientists, infrastructure providers, and policy experts. Participants are encouraged to share lived experiences, highlight pressing vulnerabilities, and ask difficult questions about the sustainability and governance of the systems we depend on.
Repositories today operate in an increasingly unpredictable environment where disruptions can occur with little warning and may propagate across systems in unexpected ways. How prepared are repositories for sudden or cascading disruptions?
Disruptions rarely arise from a single point of failure. Instead, they often reflect a combination of overlooked or underestimated risks. These may include legacy infrastructure that is brittle under modern workloads, unclear governance structures, inadequate cybersecurity measures, staff shortages, or unstable funding models that prevent long‑term planning. Which technical, organisational, or financial risks are currently underestimated and what level of risk is acceptable?
Many repositories have already faced significant disruptions—whether from natural hazards, hardware failures, cyber incidents, or institutional restructuring. These events offer valuable lessons, not just about what went wrong, but about what made successful recoveries possible. What can we learn from recent incidents, near‑misses, or recovery efforts?
Building resilience often requires additional controls, redundancies, or security measures, yet scientific repositories also strive to remain open, interoperable, and aligned with FAIR principles. This tension creates important questions: How can repositories strengthen their defences without undermining accessibility?
Because repositories are deeply interconnected—technically, organisationally, and through shared standards—resilience cannot be achieved by individual institutions alone. What collective actions can the community take to reduce systemic risk?
This town hall aims to build a shared understanding of the challenges ahead and identify actionable steps to strengthen resilience across the research data ecosystem. Whether you manage a repository, publish data, rely on large-scale infrastructures, or advocate for open science, your perspective is essential.
Join us to help shape the future of robust, trustworthy, and enduring scientific data in an increasingly unstable world.
The oral presentations are given in a hybrid format supported by a Zoom meeting featuring on-site and virtual presentations. The button to access the Zoom meeting appears just before the time block starts.