Introduction

In the last decades, archives have been developed in order to preserve organisational and institutional research related outputs. These platforms today accommodate storage and preservation needs of discipline-specific research artefacts such as GenBank or The Archaeology Data Service, but also more generic ones, like figshare and Zenodo. In order to maximise their visibility and searchability, registries like re3data have been deployed to index them. Another form of platform ensuring long-term preservation are institutional repositories. These are multi-purpose academic infrastructures that were primarily developed to support the need to deposit institutional research outputs and records of academic and administrative activities. In the open access world, these serve the scope of green open access (open access to research publications implemented via deposit of publications to institutional repositories), which supports research archiving. However, in consequence of the research data management and data-intensive science flow prevailing in recent years, institutional repositories’ content and capabilities have been extended and enhanced. The institutional repositories of the University of Pittsburgh, D-Scholarship @ Pitt, and the University of Cambridge, Apollo, form prime examples of such behaviour.

Research data archives are important to a number of user stakeholders:

The role of library and information scientists and computer scientists in setting up and managing research data archives is important. Scholars, being dedicated to the research process, are often unprepared for a number of risks that might occur such as natural disasters, facility infrastructure failure, storage failure, server hardware or software failure, application software failure, format obsolescence, legal encumbrance, human error, malicious attack, loss of staff competency, loss of institutional commitment, and loss of financial stability.