Costing of data management and preservation

The Digital Curation Centre has prepared a tool to guide researchers in their preservation strategy. Through a series of checklist, researchers are guided to reflect on what purposes the data could serve in the future, to consider what requirements they need to fulfill and what should be preserved according to the data reuse potential and its replicability. Finally, the costs of the preservation are considered to make a final decision.

The OpenAire project has prepared a guideline to cost data management based on the work of the UK Data Service and the Landelijk Coördinatiepunt Research Data Management. For each data management phase, different activities are foreseen and a description and estimated costs are provided. The guidelines come with brief instructions on how to used them and a useful infographic about RDM and sharing data costs, prepared for OpenAire by the Digital Curation Centre.

The University of Bristol has elaborated brief but complete guidelines to anticipate data management costs in a research project, so that these can be included in research funding applications. The guideline provides approximated costs of different activities at different stages of the research data lifecycle.