# The billion-dollar case for sustaining palaeontology’s digital databases

## TL;DR

This paper highlights the importance of sustaining digital databases in paleontology and warns that most databases don't last more than 15 years, risking decades of scientific investment.

## Contribution

The study provides the first comprehensive survey of paleontological databases, revealing their short lifespans and advocating for strategies to ensure their longevity.

## Key findings

- About 85% of community-curated paleontological databases last less than 15 years.
- Database creation has increased over the past 30 years, but many are lost due to 5-year funding cycles.
- The authors recommend sustained funding and modular architectures to improve database longevity.

## Abstract

The digital revolution has transformed palaeontology through the development of openly accessible, community-driven databases that underpin some of the most complex and large-scale empirical studies of the history of life on Earth. These systems safeguard high-effort, volunteered data and have revealed major macroevolutionary patterns, including the ‘Big 5’ mass extinctions. These efforts also represent remarkable global scientific and financial investment, which is continually required to support the next generation of databases and associated research. Here we conducted a survey of 118 palaeontological and allied Earth science databases, analysing their diversity dynamics, including origination and extinction rates. We show that approximately 85% of all community-curated databases have lifespans of less than 15 years, putting decades of investment at risk. We show that database creation effort has increased in the past 30 years, with peaks in database loss related to 5-year funding cycles. We advocate for strategies to enhance database longevity, including sustained funding models, stronger institutional support and modular backend architectures that better link international community databases to each other and to fossil specimens.

The authors survey community palaeontological databases, documenting their contributions to science as well as their vulnerabilities, and provide recommendations for the future of open science databases.