Digital preservation - financial sustainability of biological data and material resources

Following the technological advances that have enabled genome-wide analysis in most model organisms over the last ten years, there has been unprecedented growth in genome and post-genomic sciences with concomitant generation of an exponentially increasing volume of data. As a result numerous resources have been created to store and archive the data and biological materials produced, which are of substantial value to the whole community. Sustained access facilitating re-use of this primary data is vital, not only for validation, but for re-analysis, testing of new hypotheses and developing new technologies/platforms. A common challenge for most data resources and biological repositories today is finding financial support for maintenance and development so as to best serve the scientific community. In this manuscript we examine the problems that currently confront the data and resource infrastructure underlying the biomedical sciences. We discuss the financial sustainability issues and potential business models that could be adopted by biological resources and consider long term data preservation issues within the context of mouse functional genomics efforts in Europe.