ELIXIR, the European Research Infrastructure for biological data, has been demonstrating its public value to funders and international stakeholders. However, it became imperative to collect and communicate evidence of such value in a more systematic and detailed way. This urge converged on the publication of the article “Demonstrating the public value to funders and other stakeholders- the journey of ELIXIR, a virtual and distributed research infrastructure for life science data” in the Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics Journal.