How to guarantee a golden era of data
As the data serving collective and long-term societal objectives are a common good, the state should sustain them, says Laura Bernardi from the SNSF.
Laura Bernardi is Vice-President of the National Research Council of the SNSF. | Photo: University of Lausanne
Long before modern public health existed, the London tradesman John Graunt began reading the city’s weekly mortality lists out of curiosity. He went on to identify consistent patterns in births and deaths, clear differences among neighbourhoods, and warning signals where disease struck harder. His observations were published in 1662 and became the foundation of demography and epidemiology, showing how effective health policy begins with access to reliable data and the ability to make sense of it.
Today too, reliable data are the central resource of innovation. Alongside an increasing ability to process them in huge amounts, scientific and societal progress depends exponentially on their production, combination and analysis. In this context, data and data infrastructure are crucial assets underpinning policy decisions in relation to ageing, sustainability, health equity, mobility or digital inclusion. Addressing such complex challenges requires integrated evidence based on high-quality data. Without public investment and regulatory changes, however, data remain fragmented across institutions and sectors, incompatible across domains, or inaccessible to public-interest research. As the data serving collective and long-term societal objectives are a common good, the state should guarantee their openness, temporal continuity, ethical governance and equal access for research and public-interest purposes.
This is certainly the case for data from cohorts of individuals or groups followed over long time periods. They provide irreplaceable insights into how social, environmental and economic factors interact. They are unique sources for detecting long-term trends in health and well-being, the mechanisms behind inequalities, and the impact of policies or interventions. Without cohort data, social innovation – from preventive health strategies to targeted educational programmes – would lack the empirical foundation needed to be effective. Longitudinal data require stable, long-term investment to deliver these insights. Yet, today, they are funded – if at all – through short-term instruments, creating persistent uncertainty.
The SNSF stands for sustained, coordinated public investment in research. So, it should also play a leading role in investing or facilitating a coordinated national data strategy that makes so-called FAIR data (Editor’s note: following the principles of enhancing Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) as accessible and linkable as much as possible.
