Scientific institutions, research universities, and private research centres are generating more data than current web infrastructure and tooling can service.
The current volume of data published with public open-source licenses has yet to be completely surveyed but is likely in the thousands of petabytes when collapsing across physics, astronomy, geology, planetary science, neuroscience, biology, and psychology.
Open data makes up a tiny per cent of the total amount of scientific knowledge siloed within labs, on researcher's personal hard drives and institutions. The true size of the corpus of cumulative scientific knowledge is difficult to determine without performing systematic surveys of the scientific ecosystem to understand existing researcher workflows, needs, and pain points.