Preservation Policy

Introduction

The Energy Data Centre is funded to provide a long-term repository of outputs ensuring that deposited items remain accessible over the long term. It supports the research within the UKERC partner organisations to hold and disseminate research outputs.

This policy outlines the decisions made for that content and any consequences because of this. Where applicable this document will refer to operational documentation which supports the implementation of this policy. Note operational documentation isn't publicly available

The EDC is committed to supporting FAIR data and aspects of how this is implemented will be covered in this policy.

Organisation

The Energy Data Centre is based at the Rutherford Appleton site of UKRI/Science and Technologies Facilities Council. It is organisationally in the Technology department.

The governance of the service is part of the UKERC governance structure and the senior responsible person for the EDC is also a UKERC Co-Director. The EDC hold quarterly meetings with other parts of STFC which provide the infrastructure and specialised research data preservation services.

Funding

The funding for the services comes through the UKERC grant with the team seeking external funding for aligned projects.

Roles and responsibilities

The main roles and responsibilities are shown here.

The infrastructure support is performed by colleagues within other parts of STFC. They are responsible for the day-to-day infrastructure activities and some preservation activities such as checksum checking.

Ingest

The remit of content that the EDC collects is defined in the Collection Management policy.

Descriptive metadata

The metadata follows standard qualified Dublin Core, with local specific additions and the PREMIS approach used for the audit log.

Currently there is a link from the metadata record to the digital object, the digital object has supporting information kept with it but not a copy of the metadata record.

Digital objects ingested can have a DataCite Digital Object Identifier minted to enhance the persistent identification of that object. Metadata only records do not have this opportunity. All records have a unique identifier.

Licenses and access

All digital objects must have a license for re-use identified on deposit.

The EDC aims to be an open discovery service; however, it is possible to implement access restrictions if required. These are identified by the depositor in discussion with EDC staff. These access restrictions are set within the CEDA Data Archive and access to these restricted items are by a registration process.

All content in the EDC will have an open metadata record. All metadata records are licensed by CC-0.

Digital objects

For this policy two types of content are considered:

Research Data

All research data ingested into the EDC follows a two-stage process:

1. The data depositor uses the EDC deposit system to create basic metadata and to sign the deposit agreement. They must confirm that they have the rights to deposit. This is mandatory.
2. EDC staff complete the metadata record and deposit of the data into the preservation system in consultation with the data depositor.

The digital object is held in CEDA Data Archive and this is both the preservation and dissemination copy.

Grey literature publications

This content is added by EDC staff. The digital object will be added if the license permits this. For organisational capture, permission will be sought in writing and recorded in the service documentation.

A preservation copy will be held in the CEDA Data Archive and dissemination copies in the local EDC service.

Infrastructure

The physical infrastructure is located on two of the STFC sites for resilience and redundancy. Patching and updates are undertaken on an agreed regular schedule and we apply UKRI/STFC Information Security policies. The EDC has a Business Continuity plan to support the recovery of the service and the digital objects in the event of infrastructure failures. Risks to this infrastructure are assessed and mitigated in the EDC's Business Continuity plan.

For the content lodged in the EDC bit level preservation is outsourced to the CEDA Data Archive ( Preservation policy).

For the text-based digital objects, a preservation copy is held in the CEDA Data Archive and dissemination copies are held on each of the EDC systems. These EDC systems are backed by our infrastructure team.

Audit/verification

The EDC has the aspiration to become a certified Trusted Digital Repository.

Changes to research data and publications are tracked within the system through an audit trail.

Preservation strategy

To enable use and reuse additional contextual information is requested from the data depositor and it is stored with the digital object(s). More details are given in the EDC's Guide for Depositors. Data is not deposited without extra information. Publications (textual objects) do not have any additional contextual information beyond the metadata record.

The EDC does not mandate specific file formats; however it recommends avoiding proprietary formats and considering the preservability of format. Depositors of data may deposit both a preservation-friendly and dissemination copy in a harder to preserve format. Regarding file formats, wherever possible well-supported and preservation quality formats are used, such as the use of PDF/A or csv over Excel.

Currently the EDC does not do any formal preservation watch activities, such as surveying file formats. Our policy on preservation activities for file formats at risk will be reviewed in future.

Data withdrawal

Requests for the withdrawal data will be considered on a case by case basis. For items which are superseded, there is a standard process to amend the metadata and update the physical holdings. For items which have been assigned a DOI, the landing page for that item will be updated to reflect the status, and wherever possible the rationale for that change to comply with DOI responsibilities.

Relocation or transition of activity

Should EDC funding cease, the management team would determine a final location for the service and its deposited data ensuring, as far as possible, that the existing access and licensing restrictions are retained.