Benefits of digital sustainability

You are exploring the possibilities for long-term data storage and permanent access facilities in respect of your data sets-digital sustainability, in other words.
That is a wise decision. At 3TU.Datacentrum, your measurement and research data will remain retrievable, authentic, legible and reusable.

The potential benefits of permanent accessibility in a nutshell:

    • Greater scientific reliability of your publications, as the conclusions can be reproduced/verified on the basis of the underlying data
    • Improved access and visibility of your data sets. This allows you to share and reuse your valuable results with little effort
    • In practice, the above-mentioned benefits lead to higher citation scores (see the article Sharing Detailed Research Data is Associated with Increased Citation Rate by Piwowar, Day and Fridsma), greater recognition and increased research funding
    • Facilitation of longitudinal research. Data from research covering a long period remains available
    • Facilitation of cooperation agreements (collaboratories). All the members of a project team can work on the data anytime, anywhere
    • Facilitation of e-research methods, such as pattern recognition in large volumes of data (see the article The End of Theory by Chris Anderson)
    • Facilitation of teaching. As a teacher, you can provide your models with realistic data
    • Facilitation of knowledge validation. Some data sets can be exploited commercially or socially. This can lead to income for the owner
    • Successful transfer of data sets to other researchers and to later generations of scientists. With the possible result of:
    • New research, scientific cross-pollination and innovation.

Long-term data storage: a rising phenomenon

International
In March 2007, the National Science Foundation called for reliable storage of digital scientific output, as a basis for e-research and as a condition for global communities (collaboratories).

See the report: Cyberinfrastructure vision for 21st Century Discovery (National Science Foundation)

National
In 2006, KNAW and NWO jointly set up a data centre for the social sciences: DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services).

Technical Universities
Researchers at the three Dutch technical universities are aware of the need for sustainable data management. This was shown by a questionnaire conducted in 2006 by 3TU.Datacentrum. The registering of data sets was seen as a weak point: this is strongly dependent on personal input. It is expected that advantages will be obtained from a structured method of storage. As regards the collaborative services (the setting up of a data lab) a number of respondents see opportunities particularly in EU research projects.