Data archiving is a good investment

摘要

We have found that ongoing financial investment in data-archiving infrastructure yields an impressive scientific return, and believe that it should be wholeheartedly supported by research funding agencies (see, for example, go.nature.comzftf3). 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.