ANDS also advertises on their website that they will be working with a number of research projects to assist them with their data management.
The Open Data Commons, a project from the Open Knowledge Foundation(OKF), has just released v1.0 of their Open Database licence, an open share alike licence for data and databases. It allows users to freely share, edit and use a database while maintaining freedom from other. The licence only governs the rights of the database and not the contents which in some case can be covered by other rights.
The OKF has also started a project for distributed storage called Open Data Grid for an open distributed grid for open data.