Research Data Management Principles, Practices, and Prospects Page: 88
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Lori M. Jahnke and Andrew Asher
disseminating information to help users evaluate jurisdictional risks
(Molnar and Schechter 2010). Cloud providers are well positioned
to collect and distribute information about jurisdictional threats and
changes in legislation, an activity that is costly when performed by
individual tenants.
Hidden Costs: Sustainability of Outsourcing Key
Research Support Functions
Opting for near-term flexibility and cost reduction over long-term
sustainability and cost control may leave universities open to a va-
riety of vendor lock-in and security problems that will ultimately
affect budgets and constrain researchers. Although Glott and col-
leagues (2011) suggest that cloud computing in the future is likely to
resemble the seamless federation of Internet service providers that
exists today, the cloud computing market currently consists primar-
ily of isolated providers that are motivated to secure market share
before their businesses become commodities. (For example, Drop-
box's "Great Space Race" was targeted specifically at gaining market
share among university-affiliated users.8) This market dynamic is not
surprising, as cloud computing is still in the early stages of develop-
ment as infrastructure, despite its similarity to the 1960s conceptu-
alization of the Internet itself (e.g., time-sharing of large computing
resources and grid computing that serves large communities).
When compared with that of other large-scale infrastructures in
the United States, the growth of the Internet mirrors the pattern of
development and the adoption timescale (40-50 years) of other large
technical systems (Edwards et al. 2007, 19). The Internet bears many
of the hallmarks of the consolidation phase (although the market-
oriented nature of access creates widening disparities), but the "vir-
tual infrastructure"9 that could support research data curation is in a
much earlier stage of development. Much of the activity surrounding
research data management is characteristic of system building with
some experimentation in technology transfer and growth. The legal
and social aspects of data curation are also immature with respect
to emerging technical capacity. Without judicious decision-making
regarding the functions that can be safely outsourced to the commer-
cial sector, university administrators may create costly vendor lock-
in issues and delay or circumvent the much needed consolidation
phase of infrastructure development for research data.
Because of high switching costs, inferior technologies can be-
come so dominant that even superior technologies cannot surpass
them in the marketplace (e.g., the success of the QWERTY keyboard),
a phenomenon known as negative path dependence. Ultimately,
negative path dependence increases costs to the institution as ad-
ministrators are forced to consider the costs of staff retraining and
8 See https://www.dropbox.com/spacerace.
9 Services built upon existing infrastructures make up the virtual infrastructure. The
World Wide Web and e-mail are two examples of virtual infrastructure that rely on
the Internet.88
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Asher, Andrew; Deards, Kiyomi; Esteva, Maria; Halbert, Martin; Jahnke, Lori; Jordan, Chris et al. Research Data Management Principles, Practices, and Prospects, book, November 2013; Washington, DC. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc234929/m1/97/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .