Selection and Preservation

5 Selection and Preservation

5.1 Which data are of long-term value and should be retained, shared, and/or preserved?

Questions to consider:

What data must be retained/destroyed for contractual, legal, or regulatory purposes? How will you decide what other data to keep? What are the foreseeable research uses for the data? How long will the data be retained and preserved? Consider how the data may be reused e.g. to validate your research findings, conduct new studies, or for teaching. Decide which data to keep and for how long. This could be based on any obligations to retain certain data, the potential reuse value, what is economically viable to keep, and any additional effort required to prepare the data for data sharing and preservation. Remember to consider any additional effort required to prepare the data for sharing and preservation, such as changing file formats.

Some final hazard products can be discarded as they are identified to have been created with flawed methodology.

5.2 What is the long-term preservation plan for the dataset?

Questions to consider:

Where e.g. in which repository or archive will the data be held? What costs if any will your selected data repository or archive charge? Have you budgeted for time and effort to prepare the data for sharing / preservation? Consider how datasets that have long-term value will be preserved and curated beyond the lifetime of the grant. Also outline the plans for preparing and documenting data for sharing and archiving. If you do not propose to use an established repository, the data management plan should demonstrate that resources and systems will be in place to enable the data to be curated effectively beyond the lifetime of the grant.

Once it is determined that the data are not needed on a regular basis for the project, they can be put into "cold storage" backups which is a low cost solution to long term preservation. Data can be retrieved at a later date, if necessary, with a time delay.