Sharing, preservation and licensing: Long term data preservation - the risk of loss
- Preserving research data for future re-use can be particularly problematic due to the sheer amount being generated as well as the wide variety and complexity of formats and types.
- Unlike traditional 'hardcopy' objects such as books or publications where the user has unmediated access to the content, even the simplest piece of digital research data requries software to render it. Such environments evolve and change at a rapid pace, threatening the continuity of access to the data. Physical storage media, data formats, hardware, and software all become obsolete over time, posing significant threats to the survival of the content.
- If you do not archive or manage your data in a systematic way, there is a real danger - and one that increases with the passage of time - that it will effectively be lost.

PILOT - Writing a data management plan by Edina, University of Edinburgh modified by Marion Kelt, GCU is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/introduction.html