Ten simple rules for digital data storage
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Bioinformatics, Digital Libraries, Scientific Computing and Simulation
- Keywords
- Data, Informatics, Standards, Metadata, Storage
- Copyright
- © 2016 Hart et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Ten simple rules for digital data storage. PeerJ Preprints 4:e1448v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1448v2
Abstract
Data is the central currency of science, but the nature of scientific data has changed dramatically with the rapid pace of technology. This change has led to the development of a wide variety of data formats, dataset sizes, data complexity, data use cases, and data sharing practices. Improvements in high throughput DNA sequencing, sustained institutional support for large sensor networks, and sky surveys with large-format digital cameras have created massive quantities of data. At the same time, the combination of increasingly diverse research teams and data aggregation in portals (e.g. for biodiversity data, GBIF or iDigBio) necessitates increased coordination among data collectors and institutions. As a consequence, “data” can now mean anything from petabytes of information stored in professionally-maintained databases, through spreadsheets on a single computer, to hand-written tables in lab notebooks on shelves. All remain important, but data curation practices must continue to keep pace with the changes brought about by new forms and practices of data collection and storage.
Author Comment
This new version represents the copy of the manuscript that has been submitted for review at PLoS Computational Biology. It includes feedback based on comments on twitter and those made on v1 of this preprint.