A balancing act: The ideal and the realistic in developing Dryad’s preservation policy

Abstract

Data preservation has gained momentum and visibility in connection with the growth in digital data and data sharing policies. The Dryad Repository, a curated general–purpose repository for preserving and sharing the data underlying scientific publications, has taken steps to develop a preservation policy to ensure the long–term persistence of this archived data. In 2013, a Preservation Working Group, consisting of Dryad staff and national and international experts in data management and preservation, was convened to guide the development of a preservation policy. This paper describes the policy development process, outcomes, and lessons learned in the process. To meet Dryad’s specific needs, Dryad’s preservation policy negotiates between the ideal and the realistic, including complying with broader governing policies, matching current practices, and working within system constraints.

Are Scientific Data Repositories Coping with Research Data Publishing?

“…The availability policy should be an integral part of the Terms of Service every scientific data repository should have. In this regard the approach used by Dryad to develop its preservation policy and described by Mannheimer et al (2014) is a good example.…”

Cultivate, assess, advocate, implement, and sustain

“…From this theoretical foundation, concrete metrics began to be developed for digital preservation activities (Beagrie et al, 2002;Ambacher et al, 2007), culminating in the Audit and Certification of Trusted Digital Repositories, which was codified as an international standard in 2012 (ISO 16363, 2012). Responding to and complementing this standard, library literature has outlined strategies for drafting digital preservation plans and policies (Strodl, et al, 2007;Bishoff, 2010;Mannheimer, et al, 2014); developing repositories for digital preservation (Cramer and Kott, 2010;Elstrøm and Junge, 2014); examining library digital preservation practices (Oehlerts and Liu, 2013); establishing and implementing preservation metadata (Lavoie and Gartner, 2013), and building and evaluating preservationaware digital storage systems (Baker, et al, 2006;Rosenthal, 2010;Han, 2015). Large-scale education and advocacy efforts have also emerged in the library community, including the Library-of-Congress-led National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program 1 in the United States and the Open Preservation Foundation (formerly Planets Project) in Europe.…”

Building a Dataset Search for Institutions: Project Update

“…In order to support research data repositories, libraries are either increasing spending by buying vendor solutions, or replicating work by building and managing individual instances of data repository software. In addition, data repository systems require that libraries support permanent storage for the datasets stored within, and research data pose unique digital preservation challenges, including heterogeneous file types and very large file sizes [13]. As of 2018, there are nearly a thousand data repositories in the United States [14], many of which provide services and policies that ensure their trustworthiness and suitability for research data.…”