Data management and curation cost modelling

The final report of the Keeping Research Data Safe 2 (KRDS2) project has now been published delivering a survey of data preservation costs, an enhanced curation activity model, four in-depth case studies and a benefits framework .

Oxford, and in particular the research groups participating in EIDCSR, participated as one of the case studies. For this exercise cost information was gathered on activities related to generation of data, local data management as well as the curatorial activities undertaken as part of EIDCSR such as metadata management and long-term archiving.

It is hard to make any inferences from these costs as they represent a snapshoot in time of one particular research project. Nonetheless, the Oxford costs information revealed that:

• generating research data can be extremely expensive,
• local data management may be modestly resourced in comparison with the value of the data,
• start-up curation services, i.e. curation services in the process of development, can also be expensive,
• the cost of established data management services, such as the long-term filestore, can be be rather low in comparison to those services in the process of development.

The report contains more detailed information about the Oxford case study as well as the others including the UK Data Archive, the Archaeology Data Service and the National Digital Archive of Datasets.