Policy makers and the scientific community need to establish the basic needs of the scientific community for the foreseeable future and establish what level of funding is required to maintain this effort, which portion is essential infrastructure and which portion can recover its costs, how the work can be distributed internationally and what level of duplication is desirable. There can be cost savings by the development of more specialised collections that can provide an international service, but these savings will only come when such services are internationally known and networked on a globally accessible system. Fortunately, the arrival of the World Wide Web readily allows such specialist centres to be linked. Bottom-up, decentralised services emerging through local needs and local skills and knowledge can play a hugely valuable and economic international role. There is no longer a need for expensive centralised systems that quickly disappear because they have to recover the high costs of establishment and maintenance and so charge rates that no-one can afford, least of all the scientists in the developing world.
Decentralised systems share the skills, share the costs and share the rewards.
They additionally strengthen global ties that hugely enhance scientific development. Each collection would be free to develop its own information resource in its own way, but the use of public domain software would be encouraged in the interests of interoperability. There would be no top-down imposition of standards since this has been historically shown to lead to failure and, in the experience of the WFCC, membership of international initiatives in itself encourages scientific development. All collections are at different stages of development, but all have unique resources and specialist knowledge and skills that can be developed for the common good. The basis for a linking structure already exists.