This is such an interesting (and kind of worrying) problem. It's one of those problems where the obvious solution is only solving the obvious problem. As you have pointed out there is a more underlying problem that hides underneath and which you only know of if you know the well enough.
I need to think about this some more to understand why that is and why an incentive structure can't be created.
You gave me a new perspective on things today, thanks for that.
I built in an incentive structure. Each grant includes a certain amount of "overhead" in addition to what the researcher requests, which keeps the lights on, pays for common infrastructure. I negotiated to fund a big portion of ongoing costs for data storage out of the overhead. (Capital costs were mostly paid out of funds from a large settlement, private grants, etc.) We found that when there were no limits to usage, researchers would just duplicate their data over and over with tiny changes, which was incredibly costly.
To solve this problem, I tried giving "monopoly money" to the professors, allowing them to trade data storage and cluster time for favors, analysis, and so on. For the researchers who didn't need as much storage, they could give their excess up. For those who gobbled up storage, they could "buy" the excess. It ended up failing because I didn't have backup from leadership to say "no" when I was asked to do things that were irresponsible:
Yes, you can buy a 2TB HDD for $100. No, that isn't the same as 2TB of storage on an enterprise-level storage array, clustered, with local mirroring, offsite tape backup, etc. No, I won't plug your 2TB USB HDD into my compute cluster.
Thanks again, I was more wondering about the incentive structure for who (i.e not the professors). Even assuming its costly could someone benefit enough that they would have no problem paying those money. Could it be built into the grants structure etc.
This is such an interesting (and kind of worrying) problem. It's one of those problems where the obvious solution is only solving the obvious problem. As you have pointed out there is a more underlying problem that hides underneath and which you only know of if you know the well enough.
I need to think about this some more to understand why that is and why an incentive structure can't be created.
You gave me a new perspective on things today, thanks for that.