Rising to the impossible challenge: the storage of all research data, forever?

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

General Track, 24x7 Presentations

The session was recorded and is <a href="https://connectpro.helsinki.fi/p9osriydlgh/">available for watching</a> (this presentation starts at 0:56:58)

The long term retention and sharing of research data brings many benefits to the research community, but also has a number of significant challenges. The task of storing research data objects, potentially for many decades, both safely and securely, at the lowest possible cost, and whilst still ensuring the data can be easily retrieved (bit-perfect) when required is far from straightforward. The funding to support this activity is often only available during the lifespan of a particular project, so institutions are left wondering how they will pay for the ever-increasing volume of research data in the archive. Static data is often left on active storage systems, long after it needs to be updated or processed, which means this valuable resource is often not being released for new projects. Sustainable data archiving provides a possible solution, but understanding the true cost of long-term retention and the service models that are required in order to provide access to this data when required is vital.