A social capital perspective to building sustainable data centers for science

Data centers for science are online platforms that enable the sharing of multiple resources (e.g., data, storage space, computational capacity) for data-intensive scientific research across diverse fields and disciplines. They rely on communities of scientists to voluntarily contribute common resources that can be accessed by others at minimal or no cost. Since data centers are fundamental to support data-driven science and innovation, this chapter investigates how their underlying communities operate, deliver outcomes, and - most importantly - are sustained over time. Integrating open communities and social capital scholarships, we argue that the sustainability of data centers depends on community-level social capital. Through the illustrative example of six genomics data centers, we then explore the links between social capital dimensions - structural, relational, and cognitive - and their impact on long-term sustainability. We offer theory-driven propositions and provide insights for the governance of large-scale data communities and the advancement of big data science.