Comment on Infrastructure and Sustainability

Commentary on Sustainability and Infrastructure to Support Research Richard B. Rood September 20, 2008 Summary Scientific investigation of climate change is a multi-investigator, multi-institutional, trans-disciplinary enterprise. Community-wide assessments of knowledge are a routine and necessary activity. Infrastructure to support scientific communities is not simply enabling; it is an essential element of scientific investigation. Infrastructure improves the ability of controlled experimentation and validation. Infrastructure enables investigator groups to leave a footprint of their research and deliberations. This allows transparency of process and validation, which improves the ability of others to evaluate and apply the knowledge that is generated by the science community. Infrastructure supports the communication of information from the confines of the science community to society as a whole. If well implemented, infrastructure reduces startup costs of investigations, enables the re-use of tools, promotes the sharing of intellectual capital, and facilitates collaboration across individuals, institutions and communities. With these attributes, infrastructure is an element of sustainability. If the next student that comes along can assess the quality of tools developed in the research group, can trust the reliability of the data quality control, can rely on the information that describes the attributes of experiments, and can ...