Towards sustainable curation and preservation: The SEAD project's data services approach

When the effort to curate and preserve data is made at the end of a project, there is little opportunity to leverage ongoing research work to reduce curation costs or conversely, to leverage curation efforts to improve research productivity. In the Sustainable Environment Actionable Data (SEAD) project, we have envisioned a more active approach to data curation and preservation in which these processes occur in parallel with research and generate sufficient short and long-term return on researcher investments for self-interest to drive their adoption. In this paper, we describe the conceptual framework motivating the SEAD project and the suite of data services we have developed and deployed as an initial implementation of this approach. Use cases in which these services can reduce curation effort and aid ongoing research are highlighted and, based on our experience to date, we identify some key architectural features of our approach as well as open challenges to fully realizing the value of this approach in the broad ecosystem of cyberinfrastructure.