The first Keeping Research Data Safe study funded by JISC made a major contribution to the study of preservation costs by developing a cost model and indentifying cost variables for preserving research data in UK universities. That work has had considerable impact and received international interest. Over 3,400 copies of the report were downloaded from the JISC website during 2008 alone making it JISC's most popular publication in 2008.
The Keeping Research Data Safe 2 project commenced on 31 March 2009 and will complete in December 2009. The project will identify and analyse sources of long-lived data and develop longitudinal data on associated preservation costs and benefits. We believe these outcomes will be critical to developing preservation costing tools and cost benefit analyses for justifying and sustaining major investments in repositories and data curation.