JISC Report on Keeping Research Data Safe

Categories: NewsFlash
      Date: May 19, 2010
     Title: JISC Report on Keeping Research Data Safe

JISC is pleased to announce that the final report for Keeping Research Data Safe 2 (KRDS2) is now available. This KRDS2 study report presents the results of a survey of available cost information, validation and further development of the KRDS activity cost model, and a new taxonomy to help assess benefits alongside costs. The KRDS2 study was conducted by Charles Beagrie Ltd. and associates.

Features in the KRDS2 include:

A survey of cost information for digital preservation, collating and making available 13 survey responses for different cost datasets.
The KRDS activity model has been reviewed and its presentation and usability enhanced.
Cost information for four organisations (the Archaeology Data Service; National Digital Archive of Datasets; UK Data Archive; and University of Oxford) has been analysed in depth and presented in case studies.

A benefits framework has been produced and illustrated with two benefit case studies from the National Crystallography Service at Southampton University and the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex.

One of the key findings on the long-term costs of digital preservation for research data was that the cost of archiving activities (archival storage and preservation planning and actions) is consistently a very small proportion of the overall costs and significantly lower than the costs of acquisition/ingest or access activities for all the case studies in KRDS2. As an example the respective activity staff costs for the Archaeology Data Service are Access (c.31%), Outreach/Acquisition/Ingest (c.55%), Archiving (c.15%).This confirms and supports a preliminary finding in KRDS1.

Keeping Research Data Safe (2 MB)