Sustainability of research data management services

It is now widely accepted that research data is a vital resource that needs to be systematically organised, securely stored, fully described, easily located, accessible on appropriate authority, shareable, archived and curated. This is both to comply with funders’, publishers’ and regulators’ requirements and also to preserve the value of the material for future research by the data generators or by others. Fulfilling all the research data management tasks is a complex socio-technical challenge with, as yet, no widely-agreed, mature solutions. Moreover, in the face of the data deluge and a world recession, the scale of the tasks is accelerating while the financial and therefore human resources to undertake the tasks are decelerating