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Data archiving is a good investment

Nature volume 473, page 285 (2011)Cite this article

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We have found that ongoing financial investment in data-archiving infrastructure yields an impressive scientific return, and believe that it should be whole-heartedly supported by research funding agencies (see, for example, http://go.nature.com/nzftf3).

We used Dryad (see http://datadryad.org), an international, open, cost-effective data repository for the biological sciences, to estimate the cost of archiving data from more than 10,000 publications. We found that these could be curated and the data preserved at an annual cost of about US$400,000.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dryad, and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, Durham, North Carolina, USA

    Heather A. Piwowar

  2. Dryad, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

    Todd J. Vision

  3. Dryad, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

    Michael C. Whitlock

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  1. Heather A. Piwowar
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  2. Todd J. Vision
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  3. Michael C. Whitlock
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Correspondence to Heather A. Piwowar.

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Competing interests

Heather Piwowar and Todd Vision receive research support from the Dryad data repository project.

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Piwowar, H., Vision, T. & Whitlock, M. Data archiving is a good investment. Nature 473, 285 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/473285a

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