Long-term Access to Data, Communities, Developments and Infrastructure

Ubiquitous access to existing scientific data is one of the key enablers for rapid development and progress of empirical and without doubt, also non-empirical sciences. Management, in particular the long-term preservation of said data presents a major challenge. Universities, scientific and cultural organisations, international collaborations and projects have a need to preserve and maintain (open) access to large volumes of digital data for several decennia. Existing systems supporting these requirements span from simple databases at libraries to complex multi-tier software environments developed within scientific communities and organisations. Generally, all communities are confronted with a high volume of data that must be handled efficiently and with increasing data volumes, also economically. Development and integration of components to enable secure and reliable archival storage that make use of existing computer centres and infrastructures is an intrinsic goal in LSDMA and the project generally contributes to the improvement and development of support for long time scientific and non-scientific data preservation. Partners in LSDMA represent multiple scientific domains and are active in a range of international projects on data management. Collected requirements from partners are used as input to accompanying initiatives that cover a much wider scope as compared to community bound projects. Although various national and international projects aiming to improve common practice of long term preservation have ended successfully, shortcomings still exist. E.g. even basic procedures such as data exchange between different systems are still very difficult to perform. The EU projects supporting infrastructure for research data focused this far on large-volume data sets and has promoted more organizational measures under the Research Data Alliance. Although the results are most important components of a comprehensive solution to the challenges, they cover often only selected problems such as the preservation of small volume research data. The challenge identified by LSDMA is to connect island solutions with each other and thus to contribute to an integrated and easy to use system for data archiving and publication for researchers.