Ten simple rules for digital data storage

• DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.1448v2
• Publication Date: 2018-01-12T20:12:44Z
• Authors: Edmund Hart; Pauline Barmby; David LeBauer; François Michonneau; Sarah Mount; Patrick Mulrooney; Timothée Poisot; Kara H Woo; Naupaka Zimmerman; Jeffrey W Hollister
• Keywords: Petabyte; Pace; Data Sharing; Digital data

Data is the central currency of science, but nature scientific data has changed dramatically with rapid pace technology. This change led to development a wide variety formats, dataset sizes, complexity, use cases, and sharing practices. Improvements in high throughput DNA sequencing, sustained institutional support for large sensor networks, sky surveys large-format digital cameras have created massive quantities data. At same time, combination increasingly diverse research teams aggregation portals (e.g. biodiversity data, GBIF or iDigBio) necessitates increased coordination among collectors institutions. As consequence, “data” can now mean anything from petabytes information stored professionally-maintained databases, through spreadsheets on single computer, hand-written tables lab notebooks shelves. All remain important, curation practices must continue keep changes brought about by new forms collection storage.