Use value
11 hours/week per user saved, leading to over £11.8bn/year in productivity gains
A new independent report has found that EMBL-EBI data resources are a critical global infrastructure for the life sciences, delivering multi-billion-pound value every year.
The report demonstrates how EMBL-EBI:
- accelerates research
- enables interdisciplinary science
- underpins AI breakthroughs
Economic impact of EMBL-EBI data resources
The independent study, performed by Frontier Economics, surveyed 2500 global EMBL-EBI data resource users and analysed web data. The report provides conservative estimates of user- and society-level value of EMBL-EBI’s open data resources.
Return on investment
£6.3bn per year in returns on research and development enabled
Cost-benefit analysis
108 times higher benefits than the cost of EMBL-EBI data resources
Productivity gains of EMBL-EBI data resources
The survey included in the study found that EMBL-EBI enables major productivity gains across public and private sector research.
Foundational data infrastructure
71% of respondents say EMBL-EBI enables work that would otherwise be impossible or require significant additional time & effort
Engine for AI science
42% of respondents said they contribute to AI and machine learning model development
Enabling downstream innovation
36% of respondents said they build new tools and databases on top of EMBL-EBI’s data resources
A decade of evidence and a growing ecosystem
This report rounds up a decade of evidence. Compared to 2016 and 2021 studies that used a closely aligned methodology to enable comparison over time, the latest report shows EMBL-EBI supports a growing and widening ecosystem, and a deep dependency on open data for training the next generation of AI innovations. Productivity gains enabled by EMBL-EBI have gone up from approximately £4bn in 2016, to £8bn in 2021, and £11.8bn in 2026.
These findings suggest that the ability of researchers to accelerate discovery and address global challenges relies on open data and robust research data infrastructure. They also show that the use and impact of open data is growing year on year.
Sustainable funding is crucial to ensure that EMBL-EBI can maintain and develop open data resources in line with the needs of the global scientific community, so science and society can truly reap the benefits.
What EMBL-EBI users said in the survey
“Our services rely on EMBL-EBI services, and there are no real alternatives for us.”
“As a structural biologist, my work relies on accessing PDB, EMDB, EMPIAR and AlphaFold databases.”
“[We] could not build models to predict endpoints for drug design without the access to publicly available data.”
“If I couldn’t access the protein databases or EMBL-EBI courses my job would be impossible and all this research and discoveries would stop entirely.”
“[Without EMBL-EBI I] wouldn’t be able to rule out many other genetic disorders, and l would lack evidence for a prompt and correct diagnosis.”
“These resources are absolutely critical to continued progress in laboratory molecular biology [and] applied areas such as medicine, plant/animal breeding, and ecology.”
How to cite this report
To cite the report please use:
Frontier Economics. (2026). EMBL-EBI economic impact report 2026. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20524169
