We a perhaps one of the more difficult issues is the issue of monetary support. If the public does not have to pay to use the data you collect, maintain, and pay hosting fees if held on the web, how are you going to continue your project?
Currently, publishing houses survive buy selling copies of their books in such a degree that they sell at least enough to pay for their expenses and the royalties they pay to their authors (if there are any). To give away a book for free could have serious financial ramifications for a publishing company since this is generally their primary source of income.
And this is exactly what free resources in the sense we are speaking of them here does not give you: income from sales to the users of your product. That is one reason why it is a radical departure from how things work now. There are several ways to respond to this issue without taking the same approach to solving it.
First, the person or persons leading up the project may just absorb the cost themselves. Web hosting is pretty cheap until you need a lot of hosting power. And some people may just be able to pay out of their spare change the costs associated with the project.
Second, the project leaders could ask for donations to support the project. Donations can come in the form of money to pay for the essentials of the project, or can come in terms of the server needs required by online projects. This obviously can be done by incorporating as a non-profit organization, or otherwise. For example, in the open-source software world it is not uncommon for projects to incorporate as non-profits and ask for donations, or to not incorporate and ask for donations anyway. How successful this has been is unknown, but it certainly takes place.
Third, the data produced can be used for personal/academic/non-profit use for free, but charge any commercial vendors the right to use the data collected. Whether this would work or not for a project will depend on the project’s nature. Commercial vendors will probably find some projects impossible to pass up on while they might find others of little use. So to depend on this is risky, because you may overestimate the value of your work to others. But, in some cases, this would be a very feasible way of supporting your work.