Research data infrastructure

A six-year DNA barcoding partnership between Ecuador’s Inabio and the University of Guelph’s Centre for Biodiversity Genomics identified 8,057 candidate insect and arachnid species at the Mashpi-Tayra reserve, 97% of them locally endemic — a demonstration of what shared genomic reference infrastructure can do at scale.

Researchers CT- and micro-CT-scanned a rare 1966 vaquita skeleton and uploaded the 3D models to MorphoSource, an open-access repository, creating a permanent, freely accessible anatomical record of the world’s most endangered marine mammal.

A new ZooKeys study led by Manfredo A. Turcios-Casco and an international team spent eight years reconciling over 300,000 museum, field, and publication records to confirm 227 native mammal species in Honduras — and to expose where modern distribution data still doesn’t exist.

Google DeepMind’s WeatherNext Cyclones model now produces three-day storm forecasts as accurate as prior two-day forecasts, a gain validated in a peer-reviewed Nature paper, released as open-source code and weights on GitHub, built with NOAA’s National Hurricane Center, the UK Met Office and CIRA/Colorado State University, and trained on the shared IBTrACS storm-track archive. It was used operationally by the National Hurricane Center during Hurricane Melissa in the 2025 season.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has imaged a field of honeycomb-shaped polygonal fractures in Mars’s Valle Grande. The cause, mud cracks, thermal cycling, or compression, is still undetermined, and the underlying mission data will eventually be archived in NASA’s public Planetary Data System.

Rockefeller University’s Jarvis lab has produced the first fully phased, diploid, telomere-to-telomere genome of a songbird, recovering 2,710 genes missing from the zebra finch reference genome researchers have relied on since 2010.

A six-institution, NIH-funded US-German consortium led by UC Santa Cruz has produced the first telomere-to-telomere marmoset genome, a gap-free reference that surfaces 76 candidate genes for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s research, including new variation in PSEN1, and is released as an open resource for the whole research community.

All four LHC experiments — ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb — independently found signatures consistent with quark-gluon plasma in oxygen and neon collisions and reported it jointly, a rare instance of four separately governed, multi-thousand-author collaborations coordinating a shared result.

A Kobe University-led seismic survey with JAMSTEC has found direct evidence that Japan’s Kikai caldera is actively refilling with magma, 7,300 years after one of the largest eruptions of the last 10,000 years. Researchers stress no eruption is imminent — but the finding, made possible by shared seismic and geophysical datasets across institutions, underscores why open hazard-monitoring infrastructure matters.

SYNCHRONY, a 27-institution, EU-funded project coordinated by the Alfred Wegener Institute, is building a unified observing system to consolidate the Southern Ocean’s scattered climate data streams — with five UK institutions and Asia’s sole participant, the Korea Polar Research Institute, on board.

Researchers have mapped every neuron and connection across a fruit fly’s brain and ventral nerve cord, finding that behavioral control is distributed across circuits throughout the whole nervous system rather than issued from a single command center. The full connectome, called BANC, is now free and publicly browsable via the FlyWire Codex.

Sediment cores from two international ocean-drilling programs show that 3.4 million years ago the Indian Ocean’s ‘Agulhas Leakage’ nearly shut off while the Atlantic’s overturning circulation intensified instead of weakening, upending a textbook assumption about how the two systems are linked.

A Chinese satellite’s X-ray trigger set off a rapid global observing campaign that caught only the second confirmed X-ray shock breakout ever recorded, from supernova SN 2026gzf.

A room-temperature levitated-magnet sensor reaches SQUID-level sensitivity (32 femtoteslas per root-hertz) without cryogenics or magnetic shielding, closing the sample-to-sensor gap to a few hundred micrometres. It is a physics proof-of-concept, not yet a working MEG scanner.

Nature study assembles 2,110 human centromeres across 28 populations, finds 226 haplotypes — and shows standard genomic tools can’t read them.

A Nature paper says IXPE X-ray polarization data from a magnetar shows vacuum birefringence. A separate, earlier peer-reviewed analysis of the identical dataset says the same signal is not compelling evidence for it. Both are right about what the instrument saw — they disagree on the geometric model used to interpret it.

Kaggle removed a flawed stroke-detection dataset in July 2026 after a copyright complaint — five months after a research-integrity complaint about the same data went nowhere. Three Scientific Reports papers built on it have now been retracted.

NSF 26-513 opens $100M for up to 10 State and Regional AI Infrastructure Hubs (Nov. 4 deadline). NSF funds coordination and training; consortium partners must fund the compute itself. Here is who can lead, what is required, and the eligibility rules that matter most.

Chile’s ANID is extending its 2022 Open Access Policy across every instrument it funds in 2026, backed by a new EspacioCiencia repository service and renewed InES Ciencia Abierta capacity funding. Here’s what the mandate actually requires.

RDA’s 27th Plenary meets in London Oct 6-8, 2026, hosted by UKRI — piloting a new cadence pairing yearly virtual and in-person meetings.

OpenAlex’s January 2026 roadmap: the Walden rewrite to Databricks is done, Awards is now a first-class entity, and credit-based API pricing is rolling out.

As of Feb. 2026, OpenAlex requires an API key for all production API use and bills most calls on usage, with a daily free allowance per key.

ARC’s 5-goal PID Action Plan — DOIs on grants, ROR on institutions, ORCID on personnel, plus a FAIR data policy — is due complete by end of 2026.

DMPTool is rebuilding on a modern API architecture for machine-actionable DMPs. Its summer 2026 target has slipped to late 2026 after NIH/NSF changes.

Software Heritage marked 10 years in Jan 2026, gained UNESCO/DPGA digital-public-good status, and struck a Sovereign Tech Agency archival partnership.

Cornell University Library relaunched eCommons on DSpace-CRIS, hosted by 4Science on AWS, on May 18, 2026 — a real institutional CRIS-migration case study.

AfriGen-D, a pan-African human genomics data hub, launched May 7, 2026, led by UCT, Institut Pasteur de Tunis, and University of Mauritius.

Duke University Libraries has completed migrating its Research Data Repository from the Hyrax/Samvera stack to TIND RDM, a platform built by CERN spinoff TIND, adding a submission dashboard, dataset versioning with new DOIs per version, file preview, and expanded ORCID/ROR support while preserving existing DOI resolution.

OpenAlex now ingests DataCite’s funder and grant metadata daily, part of a $3.6M Wellcome grant to build open funding infrastructure.

How researchers access LSST data: Rubin Science Platform accounts, data-rights eligibility, and Data Preview 2’s July 2026 rollout and two-year embargo.

CERN will operate the next phase of Open Research Europe from autumn 2026, backed by roughly €17 million in funding from 16 agencies across 11 European countries. Authorship eligibility expands beyond EC-funded researchers, but the diamond OA model — free to publish, open post-publication peer review — stays the same.

UKRN’s STAR Study (Working Paper 12, July 2026) finds UK universities have built open-data policy and repository infrastructure since 2016, but adoption remains compliance-driven and has stalled — here’s what it found and recommends.

Crossref has published its first position paper, arguing that national and international PID policy focused narrowly on identifiers misses what actually makes research infrastructure work: open linked metadata and sustainably governed organisations. The paper offers five recommendations for policymakers and draws worked examples from the UK, Portugal, Canada and South Africa.

HORIZON-ZEN+, a CERN-coordinated EU project (2025-2027), adds AI-assisted curation and discovery tools to Zenodo’s EU Open Research Repository.

The European Commission convened 28 EOSC Nodes and 34 Horizon Europe EOSC projects in Brussels, July 7-9, 2026, marking 14 new Nodes and ~€500M in investment.

A 2.7-million-preprint IEEE S&P 2026 study found 88% of arXiv submissions leak hidden source-file data: passwords, API keys, GPS coordinates.

On July 1, 2026, arXiv left Cornell University’s umbrella to become arXiv, Inc., an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Cornell and the Simons Foundation are founding Members with board seats on a 12-member board; a $10M Simons/Schmidt Sciences gift funds cloud migration. The arxiv.org URL, free access, staff, and moderation process are unchanged.

The 2026 EOSC Federation governance refresh: new node-membership criteria, the sustainability funding model, and how integrators should reposition.

RDA Maturity Model, F-UJI, FAIR-Aware, CESSDA, ARDC: which FAIR assessment tool to choose, when, and how to integrate with institutional repositories.