Ensuring profitability of commercial long-term digital preservation

Financial and health records are often stored in record management systems which ensure that any changes are auditably recorded to justify that the retrieved information represents that deposited, within the constraints of regulatory requirements. When the regulated retention period expires, the records are normally deleted. In contrast, data from publically funded science is becoming preserved for the long term in repositories, to be open to discovery and access for future uses for which it was not originally collected. The experience gained from preserving scientific data over the long term is being transferred to the preservation of commercial data.