Keeping research data alive and usable: putting preservation into practice

There's growing evidence of the positive benefits of data sharing and open access at scale. Recent examples include the 2016 report on The Value and Impact of the European Bioinformatics Institute and the earlier report on Open Research Data commissioned by the Australian National Data Service in 2015.  Both show strong long-term economic and scientific benefits that outweigh the costs by an order of magnitude.  But far less attention is given to making sure that equally valuable data collected and made available by smaller and less well resourced organisations will continue to remain understandable and usable over similar timescales.  Simply gathering data into a repository and putting it online in the hope that it will remain usable into the future is tantamount to digital dereliction.  Thankfully, digital preservation offers a range of tools and techniques to combat the problem.  This short talk will show how three simple and practical aspects of digital preservation can be incorporated into repository workflows using freely available tools.   The result: data can be reused with more confidence, data can be reused for longer, and data reuse is more sustainable.