Recently, TAIR announced that its funding will steeply decrease over the next three years, which obviously has shocked the database community. While reductions in funding - and declined proposals - are part of the game, reducing TAIR all the way to zero seems to be a risky proposition. TAIR provides most of the "annotation material" for the entire plant database community. Therefore, TAIR funding must be such that it can continue to operate and fulfill its mission. However, it is also true that the funding model for databases needs to change. Instead of large grants, such as the ones that TAIR is based on, databases should be funded by large projects that produce a lot of data. Such projects could, for example, fund partial FTEs at the appropriate database, which would then integrate the data. (The really time consuming part of running a database is the integration of new data types). Of course, databases could still apply for other types of grants, such as for the creation of new bioinformatics tools. With this proposed funding model, the databases would naturally scale with the amount of data that is being incorporated. However, funding agencies would have to mandate this policy and resist the urge to fund lots of smaller project databases that will not be sustainable in the future.
